P570 Power6 - VIO + LPAR cdrom sharing 1

[shmick]

Our new power6 based p570 appears to have the cd0 device attached to sata0 controller which is also part of the parent raid controller, which means I can't assign this controller to any of the new LPARs to see the cdrom device.

I'm assuming there's some new way of sharing the cdrom device now?

Here's the details of the cd0 device on the VIO lpar.

cd0 Available 04-08-00 SATA DVD-ROM Drive

# lsdev -C | grep 04-08
cd0 Available 04-08-00 SATA DVD-ROM Drive
hdisk0 Available 04-08-00 SAS Disk Drive
hdisk1 Available 04-08-00 SAS Disk Drive
sas0 Available 04-08-00 Controller SAS Protocol
sata0 Available 04-08-00 Controller SATA Protocol
ses1 Available 04-08-00 SAS Enclosure Services Device
ses2 Available 04-08-00 SAS Enclosure Services Device
sissas0 Available 04-08 PCI-X266 Planar 3Gb SAS Adapter


# lscfg | grep sata
* sata0 U789D.001.XX-P1-T3 Controller SATA Protocol

# lscfg | grep XX-P1-T3

+ sissas0 U789D.001.XX-P1-T3 PCI-X266 Planar 3Gb SAS Adapter

* sas0 U789D.001.XX-P1-T3 Controller SAS Protocol

* sata0 U789D.001.XX-P1-T3 Controller SATA Protocol

 

[p5wizard]

You make a VHOST-VSCSI channel from a VIO server to "any" VIO client (eg VIO VHOST adapter slot 10 to "any" LPAR slot 10 and make that VSCSI adapter slot 10 to that VIO server slot 10 on all VIO clients.

Make a vtopt (Virtual Target OPTical) device with the cd device as backend. The first VIO client to attach to the VHOST(10)-VSCSI(10) channel has the device and sees it as a scsi cdrom/dvdrom/dvdram whatever.

To share with other VIO client, deattach scsiX device on the one that has it: rmdev -Rl scsiX, then run cfgmgr on other VIO client. This is business as usual, been this way since VIO and AIX53...


HTH,

p5wizard

 

[shmick]

That's a great idea. I didn't know that was an option.

It's working great now.

Thanks.