8x00 family of Disk Arrays 3.00.00 Installation and Reference Guide (AA-RW7SJ-TE, March 2008)

3 Su pport for load balancing

in M icrosoft Clus ter Server

environmen t for Windows Server

2003

This section describes the followi ng:

• Enabling support for load balancing in MSCS environments

• Disabling support for load balancing in MSCS environments

• Recovering inaccessible disk devices

By default, H P MPIO EVA DSM supports the No Load Balancing policy in Microsoft Cluster Server

(MSCS) environments. This is because MSCS uses SCSI-2 reservations to synchronize access to the

cluster-managed devices. However, HP MPIO EVA DSM provides a feature to support load balancing for

all HP disk arrays that support the SCSI-3 persistent reservations manag ement method by mapping the

MSCS-issued SCSI-2 r eservations to SCSI-3 persistent reservations.

HP MPIO EVA DSM supports load balancing in MSCS environments only under the following conditions:

• All nod es in the cluster must have the sam e version of the HP MPIO EVA DSM installed.

• Support for load balancing in MSCS environments must be enabled on all cluster nodes in the

HP MPIO EVA DSM.

• The disk array containing the cluster resources must support the SCSI-3 persistent reservations.

NOTE:

Contact HP technical support for details on disk arrays and the ﬁrmware revisions that support persistent

reservations.

Enabling support for load balancing in MSCS environments

You can enable load-balancing support in MSCS environments while installing the HP MPIO EVA DSM or

anytime after the installation.

CAUTION:

You must enable the load-balancing feature on all nodes in the cluster. If the setting is not consistent

across all cluster nodes, the cluster node failover functionality can be impaired.

To enable load balancing at the time of installing HP MPIO EVA DSM, select Enable Load B alancing

in Cluster in the Conﬁguration Settings window .

To enable load balancing after you have installed HP MPIO EVA DSM, complete the following steps:

NOTE:

You must repeat the following procedure on all nodes in the cluster, one at a time.

HP MPIO Full Featured DSM for EVA4x00/6x00/ 8x00 family of Disk Arrays 3.0 0.00