failover and load balancing Hitachi 9585

[MoreFeo]

Hi, we're planning to attach one LPAR to a Hitachi 9585V. The LPAR will have AIX 5.3, with two 5716 HBAs, and it will connect thru a Brocade Silkworm 3850. Can AIX manage load balancing and failover, or do we need Hitachi Dynamic Link Manager?

Thanks.

 

[mrn]

I can only comment on AIX 5.1 but you will need Hitachi Dynamic Link Manager.

Are you planning to use 1 or 2 Fibre switches?

If using two (No single point of failure) you'll see all the disks twice. DLM sorts this problem out.

As for load balancing / failover take a look at LoadLeveler & GPFS or HACMP

Mike

"A foolproof method for sculpting an elephant: first, get a huge block of marble, then you chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant."

http://www.airport-parking-site.co.uk/

 

[p5wizard]

The IBM MPIO driver *may* be able to group the multiple disk paths AIX sees for every LUN into a single hdisk, but the standard AIX MPIO PCM (PathControlModule) only provides path failover, no load balancing.


HTH,

p5wizard

 

[MoreFeo]

Thanks for the replies. Is the MPIO PCM installed by default with AIX, or do we need to install it (and wich filesets)?

Thanks again.

 

[p5wizard]

MPIO driver should be installed by default with the standard PCM I believe. You need to uninstall it in order to use a vendor specific non-PCM solution like SDD for IBM or powerpath for EMC.

Some vendors may also supply a PCM specific for their storage solutions (for instance there's an SDDPCM from IBM) so that you can take advantage of the MPIO framework and still have load balancing AND path failover for your storage box. I'd look on the Hitachi website.


HTH,

p5wizard

 

[hfaix]

I believe you should check with your disk subsystem vendor. As p5wizard mentioned the default AIX PCM is fail_over only, however with SDDPCM for IBM disk subsystems you can configure other balancing options (ie. round robin).

 

[trisco]

If you are to use MPIO with Hitachi devices, understand that it is a "poor" man's fail-over and there is no loadbalancing. Choosing to go that way, you should install the ODM fileset from Hitachi, Solution ID : HDS38557.