new storage over SVC... cannot see hdisks in VIO client

[wrupi]

hi there,

i hope someone here can help me.
we got the following setup:
two VIOs providing multiple paths to the storage for LPARS
until today we were using a DS8000 system. this system is still in use, but we got a new one managed via an SVC as well.
when our storage guys define a disk in the old system for the VIOs, i can make
mkvdev -vdev hdiskXY -vadapter vhostAB
and a
cfgmgr
on the client LPAR and voila, the disk is there...
if the disk is defined on the SVC i do the same
the VIOs see the new disk, mkvdev tells me that the new vtscsi is available, lsmap -all shows the disk as backing device, but on the client LPAR the disk does not show after cfgmgr
i can't find any significant difference between the two storage systems on the VIOs
but still i don't see the disks from the new system on client LPARS :-/
i hope someone here can help us

 

[wrupi]

okay
we tried out two things that actually worked:

1:
we rebooted one of the clients and the disk showed up
bad thing, because we don't want to reboot productive systems everytime we add a disk...

2:
we defined a new vhost on the VIOs and mapped the SVC disks to this new vhost
then a cfgmgr brought up the new disk on the client...

we don't really understand why it didn't work through the already existing vhost we used for the ds8000 disks though

maybe anyone here has an idea

 

[ogniemi]

When you run on your vio server

lsmap -vadapter vhostAB

do you see it is used by your LPAR (Client Partition ID) or in place of Client Partition ID you see 0x00000000 ?


I have built some VIO environment in 2005 or 2006 and I don;t remember how it was exactly, but probably you will have to configure this drive HMC in your VIO profile (server) and LPAR profile (client) and than DLPAR this virtual drive to your LPAR (client).

 

[wrupi]

hi,

fyi: i see the the vhost used by the correct LPAR id

but we just managed to solve the problem (sort of)
her is what we did:
after adding the disk to the (already existing) vhosts on both VIOs, we logged on to the client LPAR. there we deleted one path, set the virtual adapter to DEFINED and ran cfgmgr...
after that the disk was visible through this path. then we removed the other path, set the second vadapter to DEFINED and ran cfgmgr again -> the new disk is now visible via both paths.
after doing this we added a second disk to the vhost to check
this time the disk was visible through both paths after a cfgmgr without having to remove the paths first.
after that we checked it on a different client LPAR -> same there

so we found out, that after adding a new disk via the SVC for the first time, we have to remove the paths, after that any new disk added will be visible at once

as for configuring the drive in the profile of the VIO: i'm not quite sure what you mean. the adapters stayed the same, thus are configured.
if you mean the disks: we have never had to do anything on the hmc when adding san-disks.

anyway, thanks for sharing your thoughts

/wrupi