Questions about RDAC & DS4*

[Breslau]

My first foray into a DS4800 array and i have some questions:

1. where do i find devices.fcp.disk.array.rte?

2. in a scenario involving multipathing/load balancing LUNs, would you typically zone two HBAs in a single host each with a single controller? i.e., HBA1 with controller A, and HBA2 with controller B? How many controller ports would you allow each HBA to "see"?

i guess i'm asking how smart the RDAC drivers are at handling seeing a single LUN out of more than 1 port concurrently....

3. any online documentation to suggest?

TIA!

 

[Breslau]

no takers?

 

[LeePatto]

Hi there, I have recently done some work on this, but using Windoze Servers connecting to a DS4700. The RDAC is always needed on the 4000 Series for multipathing, as you may already be aware. I have zoned one HBA to controller a and another to controller b, seeing 1 port each. This seems to suffice and there have been no issues with this config. Not sure where you will find devices.fcp.disk.array.rte, as I have no AIX Clients connected, but it is likely to be on your OS Installation CD's. The RDAC Drivers seem to handle themselves well, but again this is under Windoze.

Hope this was some help

 

[Breslau]

ugh, finally figured the drivers out.

if you go to the base media, and search on devices.fcp.disk.array.rte within smitty->install you will not find it. there's the diag fileset, but the rte is actually devices.scsi.scarray.

 

[chgwhat]

For AIX I would suggest both HBA's in one zone, even if each fibre switch has both controllers connected, AIX will show one dar per ds4800 and one dac per connection to a controler. And then I would use a spanning filesystem, on the luns to load balance.



Tony ... aka chgwhat

When in doubt,,, Power out...

 

[Breslau]

interesting, in the best practices guide, they have graphic showing individual HBAs zoned together with specific ports, but underneath the lsdev command examples you see their zoning examples use the controller's world wide node number and not the port number.