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Background: We are setting up the new storage for an HPC Compute cluster for applied statistics, bioinformatics, and genomics. Contrary to our expectations, an active-active configuration did not improve I/O performance compared to failover under various I/O loads.

Question: Under what scenarios would you fiddle with device-mapper multipath configuration e.g. set up an active-active configuration or other optimizations? Is best practice to use the default settings and avoid optimization unless strictly necessary, as with many other things in the world of software engineering and systems administration?

Thank you!

Nicolas De Jay
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    I think it's depend much about your storage configuration, when I been using multibus with multiple hba and multiple dedicated storage port, I could say it works pretty well – c4f4t0r Jul 07 '20 at 19:34
  • Thanks @c4f4t0r . I didn't work well for us despite having two SAN cables connecting the file server to the storage that is equipped with two hardware controllers: https://serverfault.com/questions/1023752/why-does-active-active-configuration-degrade-performance-compared-to-failover – Nicolas De Jay Jul 07 '20 at 20:05
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    in your provided link, I see a configuration that uses only 1 hba on two target ports and one lun, the configuration used by me many years ago, was 8 hba on many target ports – c4f4t0r Jul 08 '20 at 07:38
  • Thanks, @c4f4t0r. It is in fact 1 HBA on two target ports. We actually striped each logical volume over two LUNs. I didn't include it in the post but we have 4 such logical volumes (8 LUNs, 16 paths). We stress-tested I/O loads by writing to all these logical volumes at the same time and active-active performance was still degraded. Is there a chance that the single HBA is getting saturated? – Nicolas De Jay Jul 08 '20 at 22:50

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