VIO and AIX 5.3 1

[hfaix]

Does anyone have AIX 5.3 running stable on vscsi from 2 VIO Servers? By this, I mean two VIO's serving up VSCSI and SEA's to Client Paritions? I'm trying to do it with ESS800 Lun's (Both VIO's see the same LUN). I've got it working in a test environment, but my vscsi0 (from vio1) and vscsi1 (from vio2) on client LPAR's never seem to recover well from simulated failures. Some times my client paritions won't boot unless I shutdown a VIO server first.

It seems like I have had support on speed dial from these new "virtualized" technologies.

I'm just curious to see if anyone is tinkering with this.

 

[alfapet]

Hello,

It is not so good to create logical volumes in the rootvg of the Virtual I/O Server and serve these logical volumens to client LPARs?

I think I read a recommendation to not do so, in case that you need to backup or update the VIO-server or something.

Do you guys have any opinion in the matter?

 

[axelsche]

I think the recommendation make sense, but if you have only 2 disks in your VIO Server you can decide to mirror all data (VIO rootvg and Client LPAR rootvg) or have a single point of failure.

We have decided to use 2 disks for VIO rootvg with mirroring and 1 or 2 disks with Client LAPR rootvg's without mirroring (of course we use 2 VIO Servers serving the Client LPAR rootvg's and do mirroring on the Client LPAR).

Axel

 

[alfapet]

Ok, Axel, sounds like a good solution!

Do I understand you correct when I say that you give each VIO partition one disk, or do you mirror the rootvgs on both VIO partitions?! That would need 4 disks dedicated to VIO!

At the moment I am running only one VIO server and it has the rootvg mirrored on two disks.

 

[axelsche]

Hi Nils,

we use a total of 4 disks for 2 VIO Server rootvg's.
In our p550 we use all 8 disk slots ( 4 x VIO rootvg,
4 x Client LPAR rootvg)

If you want to create a second VIO Server you need an additional SCSI Adapter, because you cant share the internal one.

The Feature Codes for the HW are:

5712 PCI-X Dual Ultra320 SCSI by Adaptec, Inc.
6593 Ultra320 SCSI 4-Pack for Disk Mirroring

I post that, because for us it was a bit hard to find out what you really need to create a second VIO Server.

Axel

 

[raylin]

Hi hfaix

I have the same config : ess 800 , 2 vio servers with each 2 physical FC 6239

I defined 1 LUN on the ESS and assigned this LUN to the 2 FC adapters of the 2 vio servers. On each vio server I can
see 8 hdisk's (2 FC x 4 ESS attachement from the SAN switches = 8) corresponding to this LUN.

We want to have I/O load balancing and protection against physical FC adapter failure in each Vio server and against failure of each vio server itself. We have no HACMP.
My questions :
What implementations are possible to realize that ?

Should we implement SDD on each vio server and MPIO (SDDPCM) on the client partition ?

Can the ESS LUN be mapped directly to the client partition without having to define it previously on each vio server ?

I could not find a good red book with different scenarios with ESS " FC LUn's" .

 

[hfaix]

raylin -

I'll try answer your questions to the best of my ability :


Should we implement SDD on each vio server and MPIO (SDDPCM) on the client partition ?I would check on what is supported by IBM. Last I knew SDD wasn't supported. I did install the MPIO SDDPCM (2105) and it seemed to work well, however, I couldn't find any IBM documents saying it was supported on the VIO servers so I removed it. I believe I saw a piece by someone in eServer that said very little would be supported on VIO.

Can the ESS LUN be mapped directly to the client partition without having to define it previously on each vio server ? I assume so, only if you give physical HBA's (FC) to the client paritions. If you only have two HBA's then you'll probably have to do it through the VIO servers as vscsi.

I haven't worked with this much lately. I've decided to give IBM a few months to catch up with what they said they could deliver. Everytime I called supported, it seemed like I was the first guy calling on every problem. I'm currently not running any production on p5. I've resorted to one VIO for the time being.

 

[sweetdaddyd]

Is this thread still active. I have a p550 with 2VIO's supporting 3 lpars with all virtual IO. I haven't implemented any HBA's yet, all internal disk, but the HBA's are next (EMC...). This configuration isn't production ready, wouldn't trust it yet, but it sure is great for putting up development partitions quickly.

 

[alfapet]

Hello!

Do any of you know any statistics that say how stable a VIO-server is? Do they crash?

 

[hfaix]

I once had a VIO crash/reboot after removing an hdisk. That was on an older version of VIO Server. 41 has been stable for me.

 

[dvsweden]

I've had vio running several test servers for several months now and have not had too many problems. I had one issue with dynamic lpar and moving memory around but I blame that on the fact that I was trying to do it from home through a VPN and I think my communication simply was too slow and/or I got too impatient. But overall no problems with vio at all <knocks on wood>.

 

[alfapet]

Question on increasing the size of a vSCSI disk.

I have a FAStT600 attached to the VIO-server. A FAStT600 LUN "RAID5_FC_1" is represented in the VIO-server as hdisk3. This physical volume is in turn mapped to a logical partition LPAR2 as hdisk4. hdisk4 is in turn part of the volume group datavg.

If I increase the size of "RAID5_FC_1" in the FAStT600, and then runs "cfgdev" in the VIO-server, the output of "lspv -size hdisk3" shows that the disk hdisk3 has increased in size.

What do I need to do make the mapped hdisk4 in LPAR2 increase in size? Is it enough to run "cfgmgr" and "chvg -g datavg"? Is it at all possible?

What about logical volumes in VIO-server? Can you increase the size of virtual disks when the backing device is a logical volume?

 

[zali12]

Hi everyone,
I am new to VIO but I found a nice forum!
we have created 2 VIO and both running fine and now I am creating virtual ethernet. when I add more then one VLAN on both of VIO it give error while rebooting (slot numbers and PVLAN ID are different on both server). My question is; do we need more then one VLAN on each VIO for multiple client LAPRs or one VLAN is good enough. (solution please)
I have created etherchannel and SEA using two of the physical adapter and one etherchannel. Now no other physical adapter is available. Is it possible that I create two virtual ethernet on VIO without trunk and then create etherchannel and configure it and use it for external communication.
Thanks in advance

 

[bonsky]

zali,
please be reminded that the definition of VLAN in 5.3 is quite different, you can have one VLAN or non at all withing the partitions. how ever you need to create one virtual ethernet to talk to you VIO sea ethernet specified so that your micropartion can talk to outside world.
Second, it is possible to create as many virtual ethernet you want on VIO however at the end of the day you need one SEA configured to go outside world. The Virtual lan yo are creating can only serve within micro partitions within the same server.

 

[zali12]

let me explain you my secnerio. we have multiple partitions(with different VLAN IDs) behind two VIOs and VIOs are behind two switches(for redundancy). so when our primary VIO fails, it will shift to the secondary VIO.
We have already created partitions on different VLAN IDs. Now we are creating two VIOs and trying to add VLAN IDs of those partitions in virtual ethernets of both VIO with trunk(checked). when I am adding same multiple VLAN IDs in VIOs, it isn't let me create them. Error happens when I am trying to boot VIOs. I can boot one at a time but not both VIOs.

 

[hfaix]

Make you don't have a device that is required by both vio's.


Welcome to the troubles with two VIO's.

 

[zali12]

no there is not.

 

[alfapet]

1. If you have single VIO connected to a SAN Volume Controller (SVC) sharing a SVC-vdisk, does it work to install the sub-system device driver (sdd) on the VIOS, and then share the resulting vpath to a CLPAR?

2. If you have two VIOS, each having an HBA connected to a SVC sharing a SVC-vdisk, does it work to share all hdisks representing the paths to the SVC-vdisk to a CLPAR, and then running a sdd on the CLPAR to have the final vpath device there?

Best regards,
Nils

 

[raylin]

you must install SDDPCM (and the corresponding ESS or SVC attachement package) on the VIO server's.
On the client LPAR's the standard MPIO of AIX 5.3 is OK.

see SC26-7637-00 and SG24-7039-02

 

[hfaix]

is SDDPCM supported on VIO servers? Last I checked it wasn't. I'd love to find out it is.

 

[raylin]

We have installed SDDPCM 2.1.0.1 on the vio servers (ioslevel 1.1.2.1) with the blessing of IBM ;-)