Single iSCSI initiator

Can anyone think of a good reason to have only 1 iSCSI initiator setup per ESXi host in production? The environment has multiple physical paths and multiple storage controllers.

Just trying to see if I'm missing something obvious.

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Deathmage

dave330i wrote: »

Can anyone think of a good reason to have only 1 iSCSI initiator setup per ESXi host in production? The environment has multiple physical paths and multiple storage controllers.

Just trying to see if I'm missing something obvious.

Is this a trick question

are there any other connection methods on the host?

BTW, I heard from my sister, they closed DC yesterday becasue of 5 inches of snow, are you ******** me!!!

joelsfood

no. You should be using multiple iscsi initiators and let MPIO make use of all available paths.

dave330i

Deathmage wrote: »

Is this a trick question

are there any other connection methods on the host?

BTW, I heard from my sister, they closed DC yesterday becasue of 5 inches of snow, are you ******** me!!!

It does feel like a trick question. That's why I'm trying to see if I'm missing something.

It wasn't 5". It was 3.

dave330i

Another "trick"question. Why would you use SQL authentication rather than windows authentication?

Deathmage

dave330i wrote: »

Another "trick"question. Why would you use SQL authentication rather than windows authentication?

too me that depends on what database your accessing. Like to me a domain admin account is the keys to a entire domain forest and server but not to a database in SQL. Like for instance at my last job that has 32 databases inside of our SQL server a ODBC connector for certain excel queries would need different permission for different databases depending upon the need since sometimes the databases wouldn't work correctly if there were too many queries going on at one time and you could limit the concurrent connection(s) per login to prevent this issue.

I suppose it's really only good for situations where you have databases that are mission critical and you don't want just any joe-smoe hookup with your gal and making her go PMS (I've seen a SQL server go PMS when too many concurrent queries are happening on a database at one time) and really **** DB admins that want to know what **** is connecting to those databases and not F'in things up.

that's my 2 cents.

joelsfood

I've seen it be of use with SQL servers that cross untrusted forests, too. IE, if you have security require that SQL servers be in core, not DMZ, but security also doesn't allow a trust (or only allows it one way, core->DMZ) between the domains, use SQL authentication due to lack of Windows users.

dave330i

DMZ makes sense, but this is vCenter and VUM talking to its database using SQL authentication.

joelsfood

Same untrusted domains can apply. Multitenant datacenter, give the clients their own vcenter, but use central SQL. Dunno, I'm grasping now.

tstrip007

This was taken out of my storage vendors (Lefthand) design considerations and best practices document. I imagine this is a universal recommendation.

"As best practice, use two iSCSI HBA initiators (a dual port adapter or two single port adapters), each configured with a path to all iSCSI targets for failover.."