Best practices for HP EVA, vSphere 4 and Round Robin multi-pathing

25 thoughts on “Best practices for HP EVA, vSphere 4 and Round Robin multi-pathing”

1. I hardly believe that setting path IO limit to 1 is best practice, actually I would strongly advise against that.

2. A colleague and I authored a white-paper on EVA best practices for EVA4.0. In that document we do recommend the setting of IOPS=1. So I assume it is where the author of this blog found that information. This link to this paper is at: http://h20195.www2.hp.com/V2/GetDocument.aspx?docname=4AA1-2185ENW&cc=us&lc=en

   Now, the reason for the IOPS=1 recommendation is because during lab tests that setting showed a nice even distribution of IOs through all EVA ports used. If you experiment with this you can see the queue depth for all EVA ports used very much even and also throughput through the various ports. Additionally with the workloads with experimented with, we noticed better overall performance with this setting. This is why we recommended it as a starting point for EVA configurations. As we know, best practices are not a one recommendation fits all cases. So we also recommend that end customers experiment when possible with various settings and tune their environment accordingly. But as a starting point IOPS=1 showed to be adequate for many workloads types.

   R/
   Aboubacar.

3. Nice and well presented information about hp EVA and round robin for VMware. Have submitted it to http://www.virtualizationtimes.com

4. Very nice post.
   would it be possible to do “esxcli nmp satp setdefaultpsp –satp VMW_SATP_ALUA –psp VMW_PSP_RR” in PowerrrCli?

5. Loosing the IOPS=1 setting still happens today with ESX4.0.0 build 236512 (latest).

   the command mentioned above to set the IOPS gave me errors. The one below works:
   for i in `esxcli nmp device list | grep ^naa.600`;
   do esxcli nmp roundrobin setconfig –type “iops” –iops=1 –device $i;
   done;
   Difference is : ^naa.600 instead of naa.600

6. Is there a commmand I can run to determine the IOPS set for a single LUN (device)?

7. Hi,
   I’m new to PowerCli and scripting al together, so I might be doing a rooke mistake here.
   When I try to run the oneliner to get MultiPath policy for al hosts, i get the folowing error:
   At line:1 char:41
   + Get-VMHost | %{$_.Name; $_ | Get-ScsiLun <<<< | Select CanonicalName, MultiPathPolicy}
   + CategoryInfo : NotSpecified: (:) [Get-ScsiLun], ArgumentException
   + FullyQualifiedErrorId : System.ArgumentException,VMware.VimAutomation.VimAutomation.Commands.Host.GetScsiLun

8. Hi,

   We had an issue where the ESXi hosts were throwing “Unknow device naa.600” errors, even though the LUNs were fine, and the VMs on them working working.

   AFter a long analysis, we disabled the following in the rc.locol:

   for i in `ls /vmfs/devices/disks/ | grep naa.600` ; do esxcli nmp roundrobin setconfig –type “iops” –iops=1–device $i; done)

   Doing this stopped the errors.
   Can some body explain why the best practise has caused this issue?

   regards,
   Ziddi.

9. We just had vmware tell us that they don’t recommend round robin on vSphere with EVA8000. Anyone have any problems with their round robin setup on an EVA?

10. It looks like PowerCLI script to set the multipath policy to round robin will also affect local drives on the host. Is this correct? And if so, will this affect anything since there is just one path to those drives anyway?

    Thanks,

    Michael

11. No issues reported before had seen issues with fixed paths and the 8000 series that was leading to LUN drops at random points.

12. Should you also adjust the path selection of the Storage Array controllers ? E.G. a HP Fibre channel raid controller (naa.5001etc.)

    Can this both be RR as MRU ?

13. Use the nmp plugin for the device list output for the device list
    Enable round robin for all LUNs
    for dev in $(esxcli nmp device list | grep “^naa”); do esxcli nmp device setpolicy –psp VMW_PSP_RR –device $dev; done

    Get config
    for dev in $(esxcli nmp device list | grep “^naa”); do esxcli nmp roundrobin getconfig –device $dev; done

14. Pingback: vSphere Round Robin MultiPathing « Phil the Virtualizer

15. This is what I used for ESXi 4.1 update1 attached to EVA4400 and P2000. Rebooted server after the first command.

    esxcli nmp satp setdefaultpsp –satp VMW_SATP_ALUA –psp VMW_PSP_RR

    for i in `esxcli nmp device list | grep ^naa.600` ; do esxcli nmp roundrobin setconfig –type iops –iops=1 –device $i; done

16. Some interesting information… is it still best practice?

    EVA IOPS=1 / VMware set to Round Robin

17. Hello.

    The correct format of this command via SSH is:

    ~ # esxcli storage nmp psp roundrobin deviceconfig set -t iops -I 1 -d naa.600c0ff000115f100db4c

    The command from the HP whitepaper is totally in the woods.

18. good information.}

19. We where told the following to make it stick.

    NOTE: Setting the IOPS with a value of 1 does not persist across reboots. Upon reboot the value will jump to the default of 1000. The following command is recommended to make the setting permanent.

    # esxcli nmp psp setconfig –device –config “policy=iops;iops=XXX”

20. After i did what you wrote, my ESXi 4.1 went in total lockdown. Cant even re-image it anymore either. Still checking what just happened… but this was the only change that was made. FYI.

21. ESXi5 finally retains the IO limit setting !
    I used the following commands:

    Determine IO limit
    for i in `ls /vmfs/devices/disks/ | grep naa.600` ; do esxcli storage nmp psp roundrobin deviceconfig get -d $i ;done

    Set IO limit to 1
    for i in `ls /vmfs/devices/disks/ | grep naa.600` ; do esxcli storage nmp psp roundrobin deviceconfig set -t iops -I 1 -d $i ;done

22. ESXi5 script to apply PSP default Roundrobin for SATP ALUA, update any assigned LUNS to Roundrobin and change IOPS to 1.

    I hacked this out to apply on my ESXI5 host as we upgraded from ESX 4.0 to ESXi5.0, you will need to change list value depending on your system, (“naa.600508b4*”} ) Hope it helps,

    # Enter ESX Host to Connect to
    write-host “”
    $VCServerName = Read-Host “Enter ESX Host to Connect to”
    Write-host “Enter User ID Root and Password”
    write-host “”
    Connect-VIServer $VCServerName
    $psp = “VMW_PSP_RR”
    $satp = “VMW_SATP_ALUA”
    Write-host “”
    Write-Host “Updating IOPS to 1 for all san luns $vcservername”
    $esxcli= get-esxcli
    $esxcli.storage.nmp.device.list() | where {$_.device -like “naa.600508b4*”} | %{
    $esxcli.storage.nmp.device.set($null, $_.Device, “VMW_PSP_RR”)
    $esxcli.storage.nmp.psp.roundrobin.deviceconfig.set($null, $_.device, 1, “iops”, $null)
    }
    #Display Device Paths
    $esxcli.storage.nmp.device.list() | where {$_.device -like “naa.600508b4*”} | Select Device,PathSelectionPolicy,StorageArrayType, pathselectionpolicydeviceconfig

    #Change the default PSP for my SATP
    $esxcli.storage.nmp.satp.set($null,$psp,$satp) | Out-Null

    disconnect-viserver $VCServerName -Confirm:$false | Out-Null

23. Pingback: Setting IOPS for HP/EVA devices, the dirty ESXCLI way. « { t h e D o c u m e n t (F) a u l t }

24. had to set this on a number of boxes, and for some season the SSH of ESXi gave me pain on the grep command, I found this post
    http://wp.me/p2boRb-w that works around the ESXCLI install package

    hope it helps

    J

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