HOWTO: Debian and SCSI multipathing with multipath-tools

After getting iSCSI working on Debian Etch the next thing to do is to set up multipath to get redundancy in case one path from the SCSI client to the SCSI target fails.

First, let’s digg a bit more in depth about what a path is, what can go wrong and what we can do to prevent it. Usually in a simple iSCSI environment there are two network interfaces dedicated to the remote storage, each one connected to a distinct ethernet switch and each switch connected to the a distinct ethernet interface in the host SAN. Then here you have two separated controller cards (let’s call them A and B) which connect to the same logical volume (a RAID array.. so here redundancy is already covered). I repeat, this is the simplest redundant scenario, in which you can have redundancy, a good fault-tolerance and can parallelize via round-robin the requests from the initiator to the host target.
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