HPVM in RX6600 - How to configure multipathing with Veritas

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Although it is possible to configure a DMP device as a backing store in a HPVM, it isn't supported. Your supported choices are:

For AVIO

- a raw disk (with or without a multi-pathing solution such as HP Secure Path or EMC Power Path)
- a Logical volume (with or without LVM)

for non-AVIO

- a raw disk (with or without a multi-pathing solution such as HP Secure Path or EMC Power Path)
- a Logical volume (with or without LVM)
- a VxVM volume (with or without DMP), but NOT a DMP raw disk itself
- a file in a filesystem

HTH

Duncan

[Eric SAUBIGNAC]

Bonjour,

missed this thread :-( Anyway

For memory allocation you have already opened a thread "How much memory and swap space I should have for VM Hosts" http://forums.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1198245 IMHO you had some answers there ... but there are not yet points assigned. Maybe you forgot them ?

In the same idea "How I can Assign 2 CPU in both Guests if I have 4 CPUs RX6600" http://forums.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1198243

and a more recent thread "After rebooting hp-ux in vm guest, it is not starting os" http://forums.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1208978

As underlined by Torsten you are supposed to give points, even 0

Regards

Eric

[Duncan Edmonstone]

oops my last post should have read:

Although it is possible to configure a DMP device as a backing store in a HPVM, it isn't supported. Your supported choices are:

For AVIO

- a raw disk (with or without a multi-pathing solution such as HP Secure Path or EMC Power Path)
- a Logical volume (with or without PVlinks)

for non-AVIO

- a raw disk (with or without a multi-pathing solution such as HP Secure Path or EMC Power Path)
- a Logical volume (with or without PVlinks)
- a VxVM volume (with or without DMP), but NOT a DMP raw disk itself
- a file in a filesystem

HTH

Duncan

[Beksinski]

Thanks Duncan. Just a few hours after I posted that I found that that is indeed the case. However, I didn't know that VxVM was not supported with AVIO. I'll bring that up with our assigned sales/architect guy (as he suggested using VxVM and knew we were using AVIO!).

It seems we are running exactly the only IVM configuration that is not supported with any load balanced storage - AVIO, Hitachi Storage, and IVM 3.5. AVIO doesn't work with VxVM, and HDLM is not supported with IVM 3.5.

We'll be pushing on both vendors :)

[Steve Jones_5]

Could someone say why 'raw' DMP devices (ie /dev/vx/rdmp/cXtYdZ) are not supported as VM disks, as this arrangement certainly appears to work ok in my test environment. Is there a sound technical reason for this, or is it a 'revenue' thing?

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Steve,

Cos Symantec don't support it:

http://docs.hp.com/en/T2767-90114/ch08s04.html

I expect this is a 'not tested' scenario. Unlike other multi-pathing solutions like HP Secure Path or EMC PowerPath, DMP is designed for one application only - VxVM, and I expect Symantec don't intend for anything apart from VxVM to use it - they therefore probably reserve the right to chnage the interface between DMP and VxVM, and if you go using it for something else something might get broken.

That's my best guess of the situation - regardless of whether it works or not it isn't supported so use at your own risk.

All these issues will hopefully go away when we finally get to use 11iv3 as the VM host and use native MPIO (hopefully later this year).

HTH

Duncan