The following documents and illustrates configuring the appliance with SAS multipathing. Note that complete multipathing (a.k.a. MPxIO) integration is in progress; this article just shows that even today you can use NexentaStor in advanced fault tolerant load-balancing multipathing configurations.

The hardware in this case is Supermicro server 4HE with LSI SAS backplane and SAS1068E storage controller.

The setup requires a single reboot.

1. Prior to enabling multipathing, drives show up twice, under different names:

2. Enabled multipathing and rebooted:

3. After reboot - the drives are enumerated by MPxIO multipathing logic. Notice the new (long) drive names:

4. Same as above, seen via Nexenta Management View web GUI. The drives are now enumerated by MPxIO multipathing logic. Notice the new (long) drive names:

5. The last two screenshot demonstrate fault tolerance capabilities of this multi-pathed configuration.  We first we pull one of the on-board SAS cables while running bonnie benchmark:

6. The cable is plugged in back - full recovery: