Month: October 2011

As I’ve been managing more and more infrastructures using fibre channel storage, I’ve found that it’s been somewhat difficult to keep the LUN paths to each host balanced. By balanced, I mean that for each LUN to each host, there is a number of paths and I want to make sure that, for example, each LUN 10 to each of the hosts is using path A as the primary and path B as the stand by. LUN 11 uses path B as the primary, LUN 12 back to path A, and so on.

It so happens that I’m using a DMX-4 for storage, and the policy we have is to use a fixed path policy. I realize that Round Robin would make this entire script moot, well, except for making sure that the PSP is correct. I also realize that PowerPath would be the ideal solution for EMC storage, but we don’t use it…that’s a story for another day.

This script is, admittedly, long…longer than I expected it to be. The original inspiration for this script came from Justin Emerson’s very functional and succinct script, however I was not satisfied with the way LUNs were balanced. His script queries the host for LUNs then sorts them by canonical name and round robins the paths based on the number of paths present for the first LUN.

This works well, so long as all the LUNs are present on all the hosts and they all have the same number of paths. I can only presume that he assumes that those cases have already been checked for, and fixed, prior to execution. I wanted to do that all in one script.

Additionally, and it’s rather petty, I wanted the LUNs to be balanced based off their LUN identifier rather than the canonical name…they don’t always follow the same order, and in the case of my hosts with two HBAs (and consequentially, two paths per LUN), I wanted all odd LUNs to use one path for the primary and all even LUNs to use the other. Justin’s script does an excellent job of ensuring that the paths are evenly distributed, as you will end up with the same number on each, but not in the pretty fashion I desired.

Also, thank you to Glenn, who helped me “powershellize” this script…my PowerShell looks and reads like Perl, and therefore doesn’t use a lot of the optimizations that PoSH brings…such as automatic parameter handling and other niceties.

So, without further ado…

Read more

When you have a lot of hosts, with a lot of LUNs, it can be difficult to keep abreast of the status of the paths for them. I have encountered issues where a path was unknowingly marked as dead, plus it’s generally a good idea to ensure that your storage paths are actually available.

Consequentially, I searched for a PowerCLI script that would give me a simple report of the status of each of the LUN paths to each of the HBAs on my hosts. I found John Milner’s post to be very helpful, and it gave me exactly the results that I wanted. However, it took forever to execute…almost 30 minutes for just one of my clusters (to be fair, that cluster has 12 hosts with > 100 LUNs and two paths to each).

Using his script as an example, and keeping a good bit of the formatting code, I have modified his script to use views of the host objects and cull the information from there. This makes it significantly faster…what took 28 minutes before now takes about 30 seconds.

Read more