XP256, MC Service Guard, and Fabric login

[David Meidam]

I'm about to have MC service guard installed for a 3 node cluster. 2 production boxes(k's) with 1 standby K series. They are currently connected to an XP via fibre. I will have 3 Brocade switches installed within the week. I'm not very familiar with fabric login but according to our consultant this will help us circumvent the 120 device limitation. Does anyone out there have a similiar configuration? If so what are some of the hurdles to overcome?

Thanks

[Carlos_17]

Well, the great advantage in Switched Fabric is to have a full 100Mbps througput to each port whereas arbitrated loop divides the shared bandwidth.
The fabric login is available since you have the A5158A (Tachlite) PCI Fibre Channel Adapter but it only workd in N, L and V Classes. After, you have to apply a patch to HP-UX in order to get FL mode.I think HP have support for Fabric Login only in PCI based servers, you'll have to check if they have some kind of HSC Tachlite adapters for K class.

Hope this help;

[MR RAJIEV GUPTA]

The Fabric Logon patches for HP-UX 11.x are supposed to have been released on July 1st. But I can't find them anywhere. Does someone else know where to get them?

[Ramesh Donti · Accepted solution]

Hi,
We have couple of K's, L's and N class connected to XP256 through FC-AL hubs.

As far as my memory serves me..

K classes doesn't support fabric logon. You can emulate the fabric logon by something called Q-loop. But you can take real advantage of fabric logon in which you get 100Mbps bandwidth for each and every port.

If you have 3 K's, 2 L's and 1 N class, then by enabling fabric and Q-loop.
All the L and N class server's get 100 Mbps for each port and all K's share 100Mbps bandwdith.

[Bernd Reize]

Hi,

the 120 Device Limitation applys only to FC-AL. In a switched fabric envrionment there are only theoretical limits (about some million devices).
If you use a mixed configuration, L- and N-class connected trough fabric, K-Class connected via QuickLoop, you should use more than two XP-Ports too:
The FC-AL connected Hosts will need XP Ports in FC-AL mode, they can't talk to fabric ports.
Although the fabric Hosts could talk with FC-AL Ports (FC-AL is a subset of fabric), you should consider to use extra XP-Ports in fabric mode for them, to take full advantage of fabric.

[Mark van Silfhout]

Hi,

Please note that with the release of the A6685A FC card for K-classes fabric logon is supported on K-classes.
For more information look at http://techsolutions.hp.com/fc/hscfabric.htm

Regards,

Mark