AB378-60001 and A6795A HBA Settings

[jhetrick]

Hi,

We have an HP RP8420 (HP-UX 11.11) with a AB378-60001 FC HBA and I would like to see and if needed change the following settings:

Login Retry Count
Login Retry Delay
Port Down Retry
Link Down Timeout

I also have a RP7400 (HP-UX 11.11) with a A6795A FC HBA that I would like to see and possibly change the same settings.

When we reboot the server we do not see a way to access the HBA's. Is it possible to change these settings? I tried to access both cards in a DL385 and the AB378 said no ROM BIOS install and the other never gave me a control Q option.

Any advice or direction would be appreciated.

Our failover is not currently working with our SAN and we need to be able to view/modify these settings to ensure they are correct.

Thanks!!

[Amar_Joshi]

These settings should only be changed if storage vendor recommends. What storage array are you using and where the suggestion come from to change these settings?

If you are connected to SAN switch, do you see any login failures or link loss?

Beware ! changing these settings may impact you to run into other issues such as long failover (resulting in application timeout) or improper failover sort of problems.

[jhetrick]

The storage vendor is Compellent and is the one that wants us to view/change the settings.

No there is nothing in the switch that indicates there is an issue.

The issue now is we do not even know what the settings are to know if they are too long or too short.

Do you know how to access these settings with the server/HBA's that we currently have?

[hvhari]

I have never come across need to change any settings in HPUX for these parameters. As the host is able see the san switch (verify with tddiag or fcdiag commmand) there should not be any problem.

Normally storage vendor specifies the minimum firmware & driver versions for the operating system for an HBA to be compatable with the storage. These can be verified with above commands and can be upgraded if required. Which is the storage involved here ?

[jhetrick]

The Storage vendor is Compellent and they have recommended settings that I would like to verify.

If the settings are not what they recommend then I would like to change them. Normally I would just use SanSurfer to see these settings but this is HP-UX and there does not appear to be a Control - Q option at boot.

We have already changed the Disk I/O from defautl (30 seconds) to 60 seconds which is recommended and now would like to verify these settings.

Will the commands you listed above allow me to see the Login Retry Count and such?

This is pretty important to us since our core data is not failing over correctly. I have found nothing on HP or QLogic's site on how to manage these cards on these particular servers running HP-UX.

Our storage vendor (Compellent) is confident that the settings will resolve our issue with our failover not functioning properly.

Thanks!

[jhetrick]

Just checking in to see if anyone has ever found a way to access the settings on the HBA's with HP-UX 11.11 and RP8420/RP7400 servers?

I did install the AB378-6001 in a server and was able to hit a Ctrl-Q and see the settings on the card, but was not sure if I modified those settings would they remain when I put the card back in my RP8420?

[Torsten. · Accepted solution]

These cards are working totally different in the PA-RISC world compared to other platforms. The cards firmware/settings is only used when booting over this card. Even then the servers firmware is involved.

When the system is up, the OS driver is totally replacing all the card BIOS/firmware/settings related things, you could only try to change settings via the fcmsutil tool.

See the man page of fcmsutil for details.