E-5600 and Solaris 10 MPxIO

[Harry_Redl]

Hello all,

have a following situation:

E5600 directly connected to Solaris 10 (upd13) SPARC machine. The server has 4 dual ported Qlogic FC HBA, three of them are connected directly (no SAN) to E5600 box (upper ports to ControllerA, lower ports to ControllerB).

I have created a VG with a LUN and mapped it to a Host (type Solaris 10 or earlier) - this hosts definition contains all 6 WWPNs of the conntected HBAs.

Configured the MPxIO (stmsboot -e, tried to allow it globally, locally per port and protocol ...) and ran the configuration reboot.

This is what "E-Series SANtricity Storage Manager 11.20 Multipath Drivers Guide" recommends.

Then I was able to see 6 independent paths - no multipath device was created - like the array was not recognized by the multipath driver.

Played with it a bit, tried to add the support to the /kernel/drv/scsi_vhci.conf (found the library knows "ENGENIO" arrays and "LSI" arrays - but cannot recognize arrays returning "NETAPP" to "inquiry").

After modifying the configuration file to contain the strings returned by "inquiry" I can see the multipath device being created but all six paths being treated as equal with "round-robin" approach. Whatever I do I cannot make it behave as "asymmetric" with primary and standby paths.

So the questions

a) is there anybody running the E-series with firmware 8.20 (the latest as of January 2016) with Solaris 10? The configuration is supported according the IMT (20150727-135856401) - although there are certain levels of firmware and driver required

b) can anyone with above working show me the output of the:

mpathadm show mpath-support libmpscsi_vhci.so

mpathadm show lu <yourdisk>

In my situation the latter shows:

mpathadm show lu /dev/rdsk/c0t60080E500043272400000186569DC989d0s2

Logical Unit:  /dev/rdsk/c0t60080E500043272400000186569DC989d0s2
        mpath-support:  libmpscsi_vhci.so
        Vendor:  NETAPP
        Product:  INF-01-00
        Revision:  0820
        Name Type:  unknown type
        Name:  60080e500043272400000186569dc989
        Asymmetric:  no
        Current Load Balance:  round-robin
        Logical Unit Group ID:  NA
        Auto Failback:  on
        Auto Probing:  NA

....

Thanks to anybody who got to this point 🙂

Harry

[Renifa]

Hi,

You might need to edit the /kernel/drv/scsi_vhci.conf file to add the vendor ID and product ID entries. The vendor ID and product ID are the vendor and product identification strings that the device returns in SCSI INQUIRY data. The vendor ID must be eight characters long. You must specify all eight characters even if the trailing characters are spaces.

device-type-scsi-options-list = "NETAPP  LUN", "symmetric-option";
symmetric-option = 0x1000000;

Note: You need to add the TWO SPACES between Vendor and Product-ID.(2 spaces between netapp and lun)

Note that the entries are separated by the ’,’ character (a comma) and the last vendor/product

entry is terminated by the ’;’ character (a semicolon)

For more information click on the following link: Page no 26 in chapter 2

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E26505_01/pdf/E35235.pdf

Hope this helps.

[Harry_Redl · Accepted solution]

Hello,

I did modify the /kernel/drv/scsi_vhci.conf file - without that the multipath driver did not work at all. But after that I was not able to do anything.

The solution was much less obvious .... seems Solaris 10 (upd 11) adds TPGS support. Changing the "Host type" in Santricity from "Solaris 10 or earlier" to "Solaris 11 or later" plus configuration reboot did the trick (no changes in the /kernel/drv/scsi_vhci.conf needed).

There is a note in the IMT about that (recommending /kernel/drv/ssd.conf modification)

6951:Solaris multipathing (failover) support: -------------- Solaris 10Ux (with non-TPGS support): Host type selection in Santricity - "Solaris (version 10 or earlier)" Multipath (failover support) - E-series array will provide non-TPGS support for Solaris host. -------------- Solaris 11 and later versions: Host type selection in Santricity - "Solaris (v11 or later)". This host type can also be used if TPGS/Solaris10u11 is intended Multipath (failover support) - E-series array will provide TPGS with ALUA support for Solaris host.

7557:--------------------------------------- Solaris 10u11 TPGS Support --------------------------------------- 1- Host type needs to be set in Santricity as "Solaris (v11 or later)". 2- Add the line below to /kernel/drv/[s]sd.conf ssd-config-list="NETAPP INF-01-00", "cache-nonvolatile:true, disksort:false, physical-block-size:4096, retries-busy:30, retries-reset:30, retries-notready:300, retries-timeout:10, throttle-max:64, throttle-min:8"; Note: - ssd: Sparc systems - sd: x86 systems - There are exactly two spaces between VID (NETAPP) and PID (INF-01-00) 3- Reboot the host

So it seems to work now

Logical Unit:  /dev/rdsk/c0t60080E5000432A5C00000142569DC98Bd0s2
        mpath-support:  libmpscsi_vhci.so
        Vendor:  NETAPP
        Product:  INF-01-00
        Revision:  0820
        Name Type:  unknown type
        Name:  60080e5000432a5c00000142569dc98b
        Asymmetric:  yes
        Current Load Balance:  round-robin
        Logical Unit Group ID:  NA
        Auto Failback:  on
        Auto Probing:  NA
...
        Target Port Groups:
                ID:  0
                Explicit Failover:  yes
                Access State:  active not optimized
                Target Ports:
...

                ID:  1
                Explicit Failover:  yes
                Access State:  active optimized
                Target Ports:
...

The problem is resolved for me - have just 2 comments

a) this should be better documented in the SANtricity Storage Manager 11.20 Multipath Drivers Guide

b) as IMT suggest, multipath should work even without TPGS - I really do want to see that 🙂

Thanks all for responses

Harry