topic Itanium Hardware question with mirroring in Operating System - HP-UX

Itanium Hardware question with mirroring

Chris Fadrowski — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 16:13:18 GMT

Just purchased a new rx4640 running 11.23 HPUX. I was about to mirror the two 73gb drives following article KBRC00014526. However, after doing an IOSCAN -fnC disk it only shows ONE disk at c2t0d0s1. I have two disks however. I then did and ioscan to see what raid card i have. the output is

ext_bus PCI-X SmartArray 6402 RAID Controller
0/1/1/0/4/0.0 target
0/1/1/0/4/0.0.0 disk HP LOGICAL VOLUME

This is an unfamiliar raid controller to me and also weird "Logical volume". Is this something new? i have other itanium servers in which i had to use MirrorUX and manually mirror two drives. This appears to be true hardware mirrors. I just want to make sure i am protected. any thoughts?

Re: Itanium Hardware question with mirroring

Patrick Wallek — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 16:19:56 GMT

It appears that you may actually have hardware mirroring.

Does the 0/1/1/0/4/0.0.0 address correspond to the SCSI address for your c2t0d0 disk drive?

If so, I would say you are covered.

Re: Itanium Hardware question with mirroring

Chris Fadrowski — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 16:22:53 GMT

how do you tell? i don't see a disk listed in ioscan

Re: Itanium Hardware question with mirroring

Chris Fadrowski — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 16:29:01 GMT

actually just figured it out. yes, they are the same hw address

Re: Itanium Hardware question with mirroring

rick jones — Fri, 19 Jan 2007 20:59:06 GMT

Indeed, the SmartArray 6402 is a HW RAID HBA offering RAID protection. At boot time, it should be possible to enter some config firmware to see how it has been setup. There _may_ also be some online stuff you can run on the thing.

There should be manuals discussing its use in the rx4640 at http://docs.hp.com/

The other stone knives and bearskins approach would be to do a find against the "disc" the OS sees and see if both the internal discs start having their lights blink :)

Re: Itanium Hardware question with mirroring

Raj D. — Sat, 20 Jan 2007 02:39:29 GMT

Chris,

You can also check the disk while booting and just before the EFI screen , you will see those two disk as '73GB SCSI..', Else check the scsi cable connections as well.

hth,
Raj.