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Re: Unable to see Hitachi disks using SAM.

 
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William Shaw
Frequent Advisor

Re: Unable to see Hitachi disks using SAM.

Hello all, I mayhave some insight into this issue, as I work HDS arrays on a daily basis and have experience with this issue. What I have seen is that SAM will see the disks on a HDS branded array, but misinterprets multiple disks of the same type on the same port as multiple paths to a single device. So if you have 4 open-3's and 4 open-9's, SAM will "see" one open-3 with 4 paths, and one open-9 with 4 paths. Any attempts to use for volume group creation or other LVM tasks will fail. My understanding of this issue is that this "feature" was implemented in order to keep HDS from selling directly into the HP market (even though a mutual agreement of such was already in place). I have also worked with the HP branded XP arrays, and am not aware of any HP value added management functionality in the XP array that doesn't exist in the HDS array.

Regards, Bill
Vincent Fleming
Honored Contributor

Re: Unable to see Hitachi disks using SAM.

Bill,

So, if you haven't noticed the difference, it doesn't exist? ;-}

To see the HP value-added management interface, run xpinfo on a host with an HDS-branded array, and again on a host with an HP-branded array, and compare the output. An XP provides *a lot* more information - including array group, FC port, RAID level, a list of the drives in the group, etc. The HDS-branded array will return virtually nothing. This xpinfo information is only a subset of the information available via the interface.

Good luck!
No matter where you go, there you are.
John Tyler
Advisor

Re: Unable to see Hitachi disks using SAM.

Well,

Then HP sales will have a problem in a multi -vendor shop !

It's fine for HP to sell their addons like XPinfo.

The bottom line is when HP pitches it's servers against their "sun"ny competitor, it becomes a negative when HP says we don't support Hitachi within the likes of SAM ( I am not a SAM fan! anyway) unless the frame is HP branded.

Big shops buy their disk frames independent of the unix flavors . So, any unix flavor which cannot fully support these frames will have a problem selling it.

I can remember numerous instances in the past where HP/UX was rejected as the flavor of choice just because of the >8 LUN limitation which existed till recently when connected to Hitachi.
I am sure no one will replace their frames just to run HP/UX.

(Don't get me wrong! I love to work on HP/UX.)

William Shaw
Frequent Advisor

Re: Unable to see Hitachi disks using SAM.

Of course I didn't mean to imply that because I didn't know of such functionality (xpinfo command) that it didn't exist!

One question that remains, is there a patch or a fix for the SAM/HDS interoperability "bug"? I recently upgraded an 11.00 server to 11.11, installed 11i patches (March 2002 CD), and SAM still doesn't correctly identify the devices in my HDS arrays. Of course it's not a major issue because all LVM commands work fine on the command line. But if there is such a patch or fix, I would like to try it.

Thanks again, Bill
Vincent Fleming
Honored Contributor

Re: Unable to see Hitachi disks using SAM.

You can try a newer version of XPINFO... which is attached. It may help.

I suppose that if there were a significant number of users out there that asked for better support, and there was the impression that it would significantly increase HP-UX sales, it might make a difference; but I guess there just aren't that many people running HDS arrays with HP-UX right now.

I wish I could give a better answer, but this is about the best I can do right now.

Good luck!
No matter where you go, there you are.
Vincent Fleming
Honored Contributor

Re: Unable to see Hitachi disks using SAM.

I guess the attachment got lost... let's try this again...
No matter where you go, there you are.
hailerer
Advisor

Re: Unable to see Hitachi disks using SAM.

the new version of xpinfo XPinfo-HPUX-v05-00-03.sh can'nt see any HDS9960 luns!