2.2. Consistent Multipath Device Names in a Cluster

When the user_friendly_names configuration option is set to yes, the name of the multipath device is unique to a node, but it is not guaranteed to be the same on all nodes using the multipath device. This should not cause any difficulties if you use LVM to create logical devices from the multipath device, but if you require that your multipath device names be consistent in every node in the cluster you perform one of the following procedures:
  • Use the alias option in the multipaths section of the multipath configuration file to set the name of the multipath device. The alias for the multipath device is consistent across all the nodes in a cluster. For information on the multipaths section of the multipath configuration file, see see Section 4.4, “Multipaths Device Configuration Attributes”.
  • If you want the system-defined user-friendly names to be consistent across all nodes in the cluster, set up all of the multipath devices on one machine. Then copy the bindings file from that machine to all the other machines in the cluster. The bindings file is located at /var/lib/multipath/bindings by default, but as of RHEL 4.6 and later you can set this value to a different location with the bindings_file parameter of the defaults section of the configuration file.