Cannot get partition information reliably

[Emil Velez]

I have a interesting situation.

I have a Redhat 4 enterprise Linux 2.6.9-34 kernel (23 bit)

My hardware is a DL360 with Emulex (HP branded) fiberchannel cards and a eva disk array with 10 Luns defined for this host. 4X2 GB luns and 5x5GB luns

I am planning on using this system with the polyserve clustering product.

The problem is that although I have the emulex drivers loaded Linux is having issues reliably seeing the disks from the multiple paths and polyserve cannot get "uptodate" get partition information from the disks

I enclose a lvmdiskinfo and sandiskinfo in a effort to troubleshoot this.

Any information will be appreciated and points

[Ivan Ferreira]

Can you explain better "Linux is having issues reliably seeing the disks"

[Emil Velez]

I enclose a lvmdiskinfo and sandiskinfo.

Evidently we have 8 paths per disk given the 2 FC controllers and 2 controllers per EVA for each disk

The sandiskinfo lists all of the paths to a disk. The lvmdiskinfo shows all of the disks that the OS can see and it reads the size of the partition.

I would expect that each path would be seen the same.

On this pair of systems the first disk device file does not work. On others some of the disk device files did not work with fdisk

Emil

[Emil Velez]

More information

in the /var/log/messages file it contains the following messages.

device sdi not ready
end request; I/O error
Buffer I/O error on sdi, logical block 0
same line repeats for blocks 0-9

this section also repeats for other device files. sdb sdj and others

[Emil Velez]

More information.

We use these systems with training. One week we usually install windows on them and the windows systems using the eva DMP drivers see and can use all of the disks.

What we are trying to do is install one week with windows one week with Linux to do different classes.

We also have reset the disk array presentation type to Solaris (what the eva says to set it to for Linux). We initially had the EVA setup to present the disks as if the OS is windows.

Thanks for any information you can provide.

[Emil Velez]

More information..

It seems that the HP branded Emulex card that came with these systems cannot support multipath configuration. This means that the OS was getting confused when it found multiple paths to the disk.

It only supports single path with all linux distros. Too bad. We may have to change the disk array script which creates and presents the luns and turn off a switch during the week that we teach a Linux course.

Solved this by submitting a case to the EVA team.

Thanks for anyone that looked. Hopefully leaving this out here will allow somebody to solve the same issue.

Emil

[Emil Velez]

canot do in linux