Brocade Silkworm and clariion FC5600 1

[POPKORN]

Hello guys.

I was wondering if anyone has had any experience running a silkworm fibre switch?

My FC5600 does not have access logic on it but here is what I would like to do and I just need to know if its possible.

Connect the FC5600 to a the fibre switch, then connect 4 windows machines 2 sun servers and 3 linux boxes to the same switch using emulex cards.


The clariion unit has 30 drives total with 3 different arrays,
I was wondering if all the workstations mentioned above since they are connected to the switch will be able to share between all of them the space on the array.

Right now I have the array directly attached to a sun server running samba over 100mbit link, the problem is that over the 100mbit link it can get pretty slow when 6 or 8 people are on the network transfering images that are 100 to 300 megs in size.

Will the servers and workstations be able to see the file systems already created and use those accordingly? or will each machine have to create a separate file system and use it individually?

say I have a 320GB Array, a 120GB array and a 80 GB array all configured to use same file system. Will all the machines be able to read and write to these arrays independantly and thus sharing the space egg all 580GB of storage between them.

Better yet, lets say I make one array of 580GB with all 30 drives on it on a fat32 file system to make it compatible with with windows. Will all machines see one drive with 580GB of space and use it on a first come first serve base? meaning sharing a 1G link between them? Also will 2 or 3 people be able to write to it at the same time?

THank in advance to anyone that can answere these questions.

I am just trying to decide if I should keep keep the switch if there is a way to make this work or if I have to stick to the samba combination and the 100mbit link.


THanks again

POPKORN

 

[maultier]

There's a lot of wishful thinking here. Having a clariion accessible to three different systems without employing lun masking (Access Logix) is not recommended.

 

[POPKORN]

Well, the only thing stoping me is the access logic flare code. lol......

Problem one, I have no Support with SUN, I have already spent too much money on sun hardware and I dont think I can afford a service contract just to get a flare code. I am doing extremely wishful thinking that perhaps some extremely good samarithan out there has Flare rev with Access Logix is 6.32.xx for the fc5600 and that by some unreal miracle it just happens to reach t e k n o 9 1 1 at h o t m a i l d o t c o m or that I even get an email asking to send a HD to clone it.


Now that is wishful thinking .... hahahaha

Thanks for your help Maultier as usual, don't know were I would hide if you were not arround to answere some of my questions...

thanks again

POPKORN

 

[hidden75]

Is that all we need is a new Flare code? What does the Access Logic software from EMC do?


If that is the case I want Access Logic FLARE for my FC 4500 to reach my email or be able to clone a drive also.

I need to get access to Powerlink. Hmm. How come EMC does not allow support to there products that have no contract? We are still EMC customers if we bought a EMC device.

I bought some APC masterswitches on Ebay and I called to get support from APC and they helped me on the phone for an hour. No charge.



We need access to powerlink so that we can support our units.

Dave

 

[POPKORN]

I know how you feel... I bought a Brocade Silkworm switch used and I called support because I did not had the passwords and they were nice enough to take my information to sell me literature later top see if I was interested in purchasing maintenence contract and they also sent me the firmware I needed to reset the passwords.


I figured this was going to cost me but they sent it for free.

When it comes to EMC stuff, you either need to be in the industry as a reseller or work for a reseller or know someone that works for them.

If you dont have a service agreement your pretty much #%@ if you know what I mean. I think it a bad policy but hey, I am just a poor guy on the other side of the wall.


TO answere your question about access logix, I think what it does is to allow you to create multiple virtual luns of the same LUN. Meaning if you have 4 workstations and you have a raid 5 on a storage unit, Access Logix will allow you to create virtual luns so that you can assosiate them on the switch with individual PCs. I think thats sort of the idea although im not 100% sure.

I will do some reading today and get back to you if this is 100% accurate.

POPKORN

 

[POPKORN]

Here it is....

Access LogixTM provides volume access control for multiple heterogeneous hosts connected to the same EMC system for data consolidation at the departmental level and increased departmental and workgroup efficiency.

Access Logix controls access to both reading and writing data, configuration changes, and management of EMC system resources. It can help improve IT staff productivity and reduce management costs by simplifying tasks and providing better access to information.

Access Logix can assure that business transaction integrity remains intact, protected from unauthorized access, corruption, or theft. In addition, it can increases operational efficiency by providing a central point for authorizing access to data.

Benefits Enable multiple-host connectivity and storage consolidation for EMC systems throughout your distributed environment.
Realize increased efficiency by simplifying tasks and providing better access to needed information.
Rapidly deploy new hosts and reassign capacity without scheduled maintenance or downtime.

 

[maultier]

The english translation is that it allows you to share clariion resources by using storage groups and lun masking allowing you to share clariion resources with specific processors.

 

[hidden75]

I understand what Access Logic is for. However I do not understand what Access Logic software that EMC sells is for. If i get FLARE with Access Logic will I need the sofwtare Access Logic that EMC sells also?

Also on your switch issue. I bought a DS-8B on ebay and I hope I will be able to get into it. On Cisco switches and routers you can do a password recovery by holding something down when powering up or entering a break key when powering up. Do these switches have something similar for recovery? Or am I gonna be in your shoes with EMC?



I work for a large health care foundation in California and we have tons of EMC boxes out on the floor. But.. that doesn't get me anywhere, as EMC provides support for them and we do not support them. Basically they dial home and EMC comes out and repairs them.

 

[maultier]

Access Logix is integrated into the Flare code and resides on the Clariion.

 

[POPKORN]

ok, Let me try to explain this.

In order to do what you want to do here is a step by step of what you need to do.

1- update flare code on clariion to 6.32.xx
2- connect the clarrion and servers to the fiber switch.
3- log in to the switch via http or telnet
4- configure aliases for all your devices "servers and clariions".
5- create zones, here you will restrict what server has access to what raid.
6- create a config file and add zone members to it.
7- enable config
8- save config.


step 4, Aliases can be any name I use hostnames of machines as it keeps it from getting complicated and the other part you will need is the WWN of the machine. Meaning on the server you can look at the boot process and it will tell you what the WWN is or you can use a the configuration tool program that came with you card drivers to see it as well. just remember that each alias is associated with a WWN, so congigure alias with associated WWN on the switch.


step 5, Zones is were you set the policies. If you have 2 clariions "clara & clarb" and 4 computers "cpu1 cpu2, cpu3' cpu4" In the zones is basically were you can say ok I want cpu1 and cpu2 to be the only see clara - this is one policy right there but then you want the other 2 cpus meaning cpu3 and cpu4 to see clara and clarb. This is a second policy. All this is acomplished by giving a name to the zone "any name" and placing the WWN of the servers and clariions you want in this policy. Egg.. WWN of Clara cpu1 and cpu2 on one policy and WWN cpu3, cpu4, clara, clarb on another policy.

6- you need to create a config file to save all these changes and make sure you add all the zones you created to this config file. Then activate the changes and save the file.


NOte and be very carefull with this. If you dont have 6.32 you can still do this but make sure you only assign one server per clariion, it is not recommended but for broke people like us it is what it is. I am doing a test tonight and I am saving all my data to tape backup. After this im gonna format all clariions on fat32 partitions, then im gonna add a solaris, a linux and another windows box to the zone and see how will it react to it.

I will let you know how it goes..

POPKORN

 

[hidden75]

POPKORN did you end up finding 6.32.XX for FC4500? Or are you using a different box for this? I'm going to be doing the same thing.

 

[POPKORN]

no, I was not able to get access logix on it as I dont have the code for it. I am going today to a huge supplier to check some on his old stuff and maybe I will get lucky and find one drive that has the flare on it. I hiicjed up everything like I explained to you here already and I can see the all the Raids on a windows box and when I go the windows management console I can see all the arrays in disk management with the dize and everything so it looks good so far. I did not formated the raid yet as I do not want to do it on windows. I just finished installing the HBA on the solaris box but I have not been able yet to get it to recognise the raids. When I go to the ok prompt and type probe-scsi-all all the box can see if the WWN of the switch.

I have to recheck and see if I created the aliases, nodes and all that correctly on the switch and then if that was setup correctly I have to see why solaris is not able to see the arrays.

I will keep you posted dont worry. What ever I find I will let you know so that you can do the same.

POPKORN


PS I shall place another response here before the end of tonight.

See ya later

 

[POPKORN]

Sorry, this is going to take me some more time than I though, I purchased 2 36G drives for my ULtra80 workstation as one of the drives died without notice. I was lucky enough that I had backed up my data the previosu day so nothig is lost. Anyway sice its a fresh install it just gave me a reason to install solaris 10. And then I have to reconfigure everything, so bare with me and i will keep you posted.

POPKORN

 

[POPKORN]

Update,

I have intalled solaris 10 on the server, configured emulex card and everything seems to be in working order. I Managed to get solaris to see both raids on UFS though the switch. Windows can see all luns. This could be a problem if there is another user that has admin rights to the windows machine or to any other machine that has the right access.

Why is this?

reason is even though solaris has two of the raids on UFS. Windows can see the luns as unformated. The problem here is that if anyone decides to create a new partition on the unpartitioned space you can say bye bye to all the data on the UFS space. This is a big no no for most people.


I have seen that solaris, linux and windows support fat32 partitions. Even though is not the most efficient I think it is worth a shot in my case just to see if it can be done. I have spent days searching for the answere but it seems that this one im gonna be on my own as nobody seem to use fat32 on solaris.

1- pcfs can be used to mount fat32 partitions this is pretty much native support with read and write.

2- If I try to format a raid with fat32 from windows it works, however when I try to mount it I get wrong magic number error on the mount.

3 - If I use mkfs -pcfs on solaris I run into all kinds of problems as there is not very good documentation or I have not been able to find clear docs as to how to make a fat32 partititon using this scheme.


If anyone knows how to create fat32 on solaris by all means enlighten me, I am tired and frustrated.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

bash-3.00# mkfs -F pcfs /dev/rdsk/c2t1d0s2

Device /dev/rdsk/c2t1d0s2 was assumed to be a diskette.
A diskette specific operation failed on this device.
If the device is a hard disk, provide the name of the full physical disk,
and qualify that name with a logical drive specifier.

Hint: the device is usually something similar to

/dev/rdsk/c0d0p0 or /dev/rdsk/c0t0d0p0 (x86)
/dev/rdsk/c0t5d0s2 (sparc)

The drive specifier is appended to the device name. For example:

/dev/rdsk/c0t5d0s2:c or /dev/rdsk/c0d0p0:boot


ok lets try that


bash-3.00# mkfs -F pcfs /dev/rdsk/c2t1d0s2:c
Bad Sig on master boot record!

nope, that did not worked either

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
here is the format


bash-3.00# format
Searching for disks...done


AVAILABLE DISK SELECTIONS:
0. c0t0d0 <SEAGATE-ST118273LC-6246 cyl 7499 alt 2 hd 20 sec 237> scsi0
/pci@1f,4000/scsi@3/sd@0,0
1. c0t1d0 <SEAGATE-ST118273LC-5702 cyl 7499 alt 2 hd 20 sec 237> scsi1
/pci@1f,4000/scsi@3/sd@1,0
2. c2t0d1 <DGC-RAID5-0511 cyl 54194 alt 2 hd 5 sec 640>
/pci@1f,2000/fibre-channel@1/sd@0,1
3. c2t0d3 <DGC-RAID5-0511 cyl 54194 alt 2 hd 9 sec 640>
/pci@1f,2000/fibre-channel@1/sd@0,3
4. c2t1d0 <DGC-RAID5-0511 cyl 54194 alt 2 hd 8 sec 640>
/pci@1f,2000/fibre-channel@1/sd@1,0


------------------------------------------------------------------


c2t1d0 is were I need to create the fat32 partititon. any help would be appreciated.



anyway, This is just an obstacle on the hurdle. Once I figure out how in the world to format the whole array as fat32 then I can try to mount it in solaris and thus mount it in windows at the same time and see the behaviour.

If everything works, I will test read and write from solaris. Then I will test read and write from windows. Then read and write from linux. If all these work then I will try multiple read and writes at the same time from various operating systems at the same time. If that works, I will be a happy camper.

never the less this is just an experiment, weather it will work or not, I do not know, but, I guess we will find out. If it does not work ohh well, at least I tried. If it does work, then at least I leave my foot print in here with the details on how I did it so that other people like your self have a chance at getting to work too.

Now if anyone would please help me with this fat32 issue on solaris...


Thanks in advance POPKORN

 

[POPKORN]

Ok sorry I took so long.

OK, here is what you can and cannot do in this type of env.

if you dont have access logix here is what you can do.


you can have multiple workstations or servers connected to the fibre switch. You can have multiple clariion's or storage tek or any FC storage devices attached to the same switch.

now here is the tricky part. what ever luns you use for one machine cannot be used in another, meaning that if you have 3 raid 5 and you asssign 1 array to a windows box, 1 to a a solaris and one to a windows you are all done there.

how ever, you can also create fat32 under linux and share the same lun with windows. Yes you can actually have them both mounted at the same time. Same lun on windows and Linux. I was not able to mount it using pcfs under solaris, dont know the reason why I played with this for 3 days and I gave up hope on solaris as far as fat32 goes.

I was able to read and write from the windows and from the linux box however, The only requirement that I had was to be able to do it and I did not tested the ability to have both read and write at the same time. I just did not wanted to take the risk of something going bad on the OS level or any kind of corruption as I had other clariion units connected to the network and I just did not wanted to take any chances. Feel free to try it if you have no data or no other traffic that can be affected.


let me know if you did this as it would be nice to know if that can be done too.



POPKORN

 

[hidden75]

Hey POPKORN,

I have a EMC DS-8B Brocade switch at home. I'm having trouble getting into it. I connected using hyperterm and RS232 and I get nothing when I turn it on? How do you connect up to these things and configure them?

Thanks

 

[squiddog]

You cannot use SAN to share a LUN between servers in R/W mode UNLESS those servers are running some sort of clustering software that can deal with active/active disk access.

If you want to share a drive between multiple machines, NAS is your answer. If you want high performance block level access, FC is your answer.

You can use different drives, but you MUST use LUN masking at some level. Since Access Logix wasn't available for your system, you must do the masking at the hosts. This is feasible, but if you screw it up, one hose will dump all over another hosts data. Use with care. At your own risk.

With regards to getting into your Brocade switch: Do you have a Brocade cable? It's not a standard null-modem cable as used by Cisco and the rest of the world. It's a Brocade cable. Until you have the right pin-out, you won't see anything.

--
Bill Plein
a.k.a. squiddog
Contact me at

http://squadengine.com

 

[POPKORN]

squiddog,

you are right about that, I knew that that was sort of mission impossible as maultier had explained this to me a while back but, I still wanted to see if I could do it just for the heck of it.

For everybody out there, you cannot do it without access logix. What I did was to enable the same lun on 2 servers but only one of them accessing the data at any given point. What you guys can do is the following.

1- you can either create separate raids on the same clariion, meaning if you have 20 drives you can create 3 raid 5's or 2 what ever you want with host spairs, I personally use 2 hot spares. Then you can assign each raid 5 to a different machine on the brocade silkworm switch. So each machine can see its own lun but not the others lun.

and option 2, you can place your clariions on solaris or linux and share them via samba over fibre. You can actualy enable ip/fc on windows, linux and solaris and then samba will use the fibre adapter to send and receive data.

At the moment im using 4 clariions and I have a mixture of both options. Samba definatly performs a lot better by ip/fc than by tcp-ip. I recommend you use the ip functionality of the emulex cards which is what I use and it gives me way better performance than using nic card.

Thank you guys for the help anyways...

POPKORN

 

[hidden75]

I got into the Brocade 2400's and the 2800's.. I actually like the 16 port ones better than the 8 port switches.. The 8 port switch is much louder than the 16 port switch.

I have setup the complete redundancy , two SP's, two switches , two HBA's in each box. Works great. Even killed a path and powerpath killed the path.

I guess with a FC4500 since each SP has two fiber ports you cannot connect each port to a switch. I guess because the FC4500's two fiber ports on each SP is actually connected together like a hub. I think you can do this with the other Clariion models.. I haven't tried it on my FC4500 yet..


Anyone tried connecting both ports on each SP to different switches in a duel switch design?

 

[squiddog]

hidden75-

A hub is controlled or "owned" when it connects to a switch. You cannot connect a hub to 2 switches simultaneously, and as you noted, a FC4500's 2 ports on an SP are hubbed.

I've even tried putting a host on one and switch on the other and that didn't work, but in my understanding it ~should~ have worked.

--
Bill Plein
a.k.a. squiddog
Contact me at

http://squadengine.com