topic Re: fiber channel host adpater question in Operating System - Linux

fiber channel host adpater question

NPI — Mon, 15 May 2006 10:05:55 GMT

Hello,
we have a proliant dl740 with Red Hat AS4.
We have 3 identical adapters for fiber channel.
2 of these are used for the storage (they are linked to an EVA 5000), the other one is linked to an MSL 5026 Tape Library.
The adapaters are: "Fibre Channel Host Adapter for QLA2340"

We'd like to load 2 modules: one for the 2 "Storage adapters", with some options (fail over for example), and one for the "Tape Library Adapters", with other options (here fail over is useless, for example).

For the moment we use only one module for the 3 adapters; here our modprobe.conf:

install bonding0 /sbin/modprobe bmc5700; /sbin/modprobe e1000; /sbin/modprobe --ignore-install bonding0
install bonding0 /sbin/modprobe bonding -obond0 mode=1 miimon=100
install bonding1 /sbin/modprobe bonding -obond1 mode=4 miimon=100
alias bond0 bonding0
alias bond1 bonding1
alias eth0 bcm5700
alias eth1 bcm5700
alias eth2 bcm5700
alias eth4 e1000
alias eth3 e1000
alias scsi_hostadapter cciss
alias usb-controller ohci-hcd
options scsi_mod max_luns=128
alias scsi_hostadapter1 qla2xxx_conf
alias scsi_hostadapter2 qla2300
alias scsi_hostadapter3 qla6312
options qla2xxx ql2xmaxqdepth=16 qlport_down_retry=30 ql2xloginretrycount=30 ql2xfailover=1 ql2xlbType=1

We suppose we have to do something similar to what we have done for bonding.

We now use: hp_qla2x00src-8.01.03p4-20

If someone can help...

Thanks,
Filippo

Re: fiber channel host adpater question

Uwe Zessin — Mon, 15 May 2006 11:14:18 GMT

The device driver will do multipath filtering only for _disk_ arrays it has in its internal table. You should be fine using one driver.

Re: fiber channel host adpater question

Florian Heigl (new acc) — Mon, 15 May 2006 17:45:58 GMT

I think if You want that granular configuration You need to use the devicemapper MPIO implementation.

From what I understood reading
http://www.linuxsymposium.org/2005/linuxsymposium_procv1.pdf
it will allow You to freely configure failover settings per device and mostly autoconfigure them. I have yet to try it out, though.

Just don't waste Your time using md 'pseudo-raid' high availability ;)

Re: fiber channel host adpater question

NPI — Tue, 16 May 2006 09:10:00 GMT

Thanks for the answers.
In the fact, the question I made is due to a problem we have with our Tape Library (which has 2 Tape Drives)...

Unfortunatly This morning another problem (different from the one for which we've opened this case) has occurred on our tape library: /dev/nst1 can't eject the tape that has inside (and is marked as "uninstalled" by the library monitor), and the other drive is doing an important (and quite long)backup that we can't stop...

So, for the moment, we can consider this case as close: we'll write again when this hardware problem will be solved.

Thanks to all, anyway

Filippo