Understanding the way mulitpathing works right out of the box, and listening to EMC powerpathVE pitch, I wonder if it has occurred to anyone that wiring up 4 HBA ports might be a bit much, and instead just wire up 2 single port HBAs, if that is, there ins't any specific multipathing software in use to achieve what powerpathVE does.
To me, this sounds like a great way to save some money, and I kind of thought about it in relation to RAID5 RGs in that when 1 disk fails you have to replace it before another does to avoid major problems. So when you lose a single port HBA you only have 1 left in the host keeping you alive, that if failed, would create unwanted problems.
So when folks out there are building RAID5 RGs to house the VMs but then are wiring up 4 HBA ports to the SAN per host, is there an inconsistency here or is it just me? Looking for experienced perspectives on this.
and how does the above relate to blades configurations that are in use today? It has been a while since I've actually been logged into ESXi running on a blade, and I know it would vary from vendor to vendor, but I'm just curious to get a feeling for best practices and what admins are doing for storage configs.