Finding alternate paths to disk

[Jesse Reyes]

Rich,

We are also in the process of connecting a Hitachi Storage subsystem to a N4000 Server thru Fiber. What type of HBA's are you using?

[Dave Wherry]

Rich,
Did you get the array from Hitachi or is it a XP256/512?
If it is a XP you can get a utility called xpinfo. I would imagine that Hitachi would have something similar.
Anyway, scripting is not my strong suit, but, you could do a script that essentially follows this logic.
Do "xpinfo -il"
This will give you a listing of the LUNs on your host. It is ordered by LDev number. It also has the device file for each port that the LDev is assigned to. For each LDev do a pvdisplay on the device file. You will see if it is in a volume group. If not it might be an alternate link that is not added to a volume group. If all device files for an LDev are not in a volume group, it is available. From this you could produce a list of available disks.
I'm not thinking it all the way through, I have to get back to something else right now. I don't think it would be that hard. Just playing with it here I've found some alternate links I do not have setup. I will be working with this more in the next few days.

[M Batteux]

Hi Rich,

the only way i've found to get informations about alternate path : by SAM/Disks and File Systems
... no warranty but it works !

best regards

Alain Guillaume

[Mark van Hassel]

Hi Rich,

You don't have to worry about someone else trying to destroy your vg with pvcreate: as long as the "-f" option is not used !
pvcreate will return an error indicating that the pv is already in use. pvdisplay will then indicate that it is configured in a vg..