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I have a question regarding oVirt and multipathing. I have a cluster with 4 hosts and a storage system (Dell EMC) connected via fibre channel. At the moment I have a SAN Switch between the hosts and the storage system, but I want to attach the hosts and storage system directly via two fibre channel paths on each host.

Therefore, I need multipathing. the hosts run centos 7 minimal and multipath is installed and active. do i need to change the multipath.conf file, or does centos recognize the two paths automatically? Is it active/passiv or active/active with loadbalancing? The documentation of oVirt does only explain very little and more about iSCSI.

I am new to this topic so bear with me please. :)

Jonathan Hall
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MatthiasAUT
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Why don't you want to set up another SAN switch and configure the second fabric instead of crushing existing one? Having SAN with redundant fabrics (so called dual-fabric configuration) is preferable to direct-attachment because of scalability, flexibility, manageability, etc. Multipathing must be configured on hosts as well.

What is the model of your DELL/EMC storage? The most modern storage systems that are able to run in FC-SAN environments are active/active or at least support Asymmetric Logical Unit Access (ALUA). So yes, again, multipathing is in the list of best practices.

And obviously, it's not a complete answer because I know nothing about oVirt virtualization platform, but I have too few reputation points to post a comment.

Mikhail Zakharov
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    Hello Mikhail, thank you for your comment. The answer to my question is already answered internaly. Yeah we are going to keep the SAN Switch and extend to a second one, in order to be save in case of failure. You are right with your dual-fabric configuration. Since every server has only two fibre channel IO in case of a storage migration no IO is left for the new storage. Thus, multipathing with SAN Switchtes is the best case scenario. – MatthiasAUT May 30 '18 at 12:29