Redundancy using 2xfibre HBAs, 2xhubs and a 4100

[Paul Hatcher]

Set up is:
DL580 (not G2) running NT4 SP6a
2x Emulex fibre HBAs
2x 7-port fibre hubs
1x 4100 with 2x controllers

The intention is to make a complete redundant path to the disks. I am having huge problems getting the two emulex cards to function as a redundant pair and can find no useful information on how to do this. With all of the connections made I can see the disks but breaking one or the other loop does not necessarly fail to the other loop. When running Compaq Redundancy Manager(Fibre Channel) I get the error "The Compaq Fibre Redundancy Driver is not running on the system or is not responding to I/O.

Any help greatly appreciated

Regards
Paul Hatcher

[Mike Naime]

Paul:

Unfortunately, the WINNT OS does not nativly support multi-pathing your storage. you must add a layered product/driver like the SecurePath software. This give other OS's the same ability to talk to HP/Compaq Storageworks storage controllers that is built into the Alphaserver firmware. The multipathing failover is part of the OS for OpenVMS and TRU-64 Unix.

Note: the Fibre channel HBA that goes in my Alphaservers, AIX servers, and Wintel boxes all look the same. They are all made by Emulex, but they have different firmware for the different OS's. I cannot take an LP8000 out of my Alphaserver, and have it work correctly in a W2K server, or visa-versa.

[Paul Hatcher]

Many thanks for the reply - the "Compaq Redundancy Manager" software is the layered software/driver you were referring to for NT4 (Securepath is for W2k I believe).
It turns out that the Compaq Redundancy Manager software was not tested on Emulex cards and to use it the cards must run using the CPQFCALM.SYS driver. Having switched my cards and reinstalled the software it is now working as it should

Cheers
Paul