Linuz on Alpha servers

[Douglas Buxton]

Anyone with information on device drivers needed for installation on SAN (fibre channel) disks? We are looking to go with Linux/Oracle RAC on Alpha ES4x class machines. I've tried installing to SAN disks and the installation problem sees no disks for partitioning. CD 1 supposedly has the /dev directory on it for specifying different booting device controllers, and I tried to look there for a drive usable for the SAN, and even the directory doesn't exist.

Config: ES45: 3x1 Ghz: 8 Gb: 1.2 TB SAN disks.

[Steven E. Protter]

You need to have fiber cards that are compatible with the Linux distribution and the array.

I'm not convinced at this point you are actually using certified hardware.

SEP

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hello Douglas,

which Distro/version are you using, which FC controllers are in the ES45?

Greetings, Martin

[Douglas Buxton]

We are using the HP download of 7.2. The SAN is with 3 EMA12000 (larger versions of the MA1000), 3 HSG80 controller pairs, with FC3454 HBA's.

[Uwe Zessin]

Douglas,
I would as a first step try with the WWIDMGR at console level to identify the LUNs.

As I don't know how experienced you are, some hints:

- make sure that the fibre channel adapters in the ES45s appear as connections on the EMA and assign them the proper operating system type

- make sure that the connections are granted access to the units unless they run with ENABLE_ACCESS_PATH=ALL

- look on the AlphaServer console:
>>> wwidmgr -show wwid

[Douglas Buxton]

All the volumes (6 mirror sets) were running on the same ES45 with VMS, so the boot disk has been set with wwidmgr -quickset, etc. All the volumes sho up in SRM after you do the WWIDMGR -sho adapter. I have verified that they are still accessible by booting the VMS disk (on the SAN). It was a two node VMS cluster.

[Uwe Zessin]

I have gone a little fishing and what I have found so far is:

- the FCA2354 is an Emulex adapter

- for Linux on Alpha it looks like you need the 167433-B21 / DS-SWLA4-PD adapter which is, as far as I can tell, a QLogic adapter. According to the web page it is a retired product. There is no Secure path for Alpha.

So, unless I have missed something it looks like there is no Fibre Channel support for Alpha/Linux available from HP.

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hi,

just to throw in another grain of Salt, you are aware that Redhat (I suppose that is the 7.2 you refer to) does not support Alpha anymore. So, if you are setting up this as a new system (as it seems), I'd look for a distro that has continued support for Alpha. You might want to
give debian (www.debian.org) a spin, not sure about others.

Greetings, Martin

[Douglas Buxton]

Okay... I've looked all over the RedHat site and couldn't find anything about dropping support for Alpha's. They even still have Alpha's in their certivied hardware list. Where did you get the information that they no longer support these boxes? I need to confirm it to get our team to look at SuSE or Debian as a platform and start researching the clustering technologies there (we're looking at putting up an Oracle DB cluster that could be 12 TB!).

[Stuart Browne]

RedHat dropped support for all Alpha boxes in their 'home' series of releases.

The professional (Enterprise) releases (the AS series only) supported them for a while, but I can no longer find any references to it's availablity.

The latest comparison shows:

http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/comparison/

No Alpha support for any RH Enterprise product listed.

[Martin P.J. Zinser]

Hi,

this is their list of supported platforms as per the Website:

AS ES WS
Intel X86 compatible Y Y Y
Intel Itanium Y N Y
AMD AMD64 Y N Y
IBM PowerPC Y N N
IBM Mainframe Y N N

(ITRC might screw the format, but that Alpha
is missing should be obvious anyhow).

If your intend is to do Oracle on this box, get in touch with them and ask what Linux version they want to have. If you are not on a supported (by Oracle) version you are asking for trouble.

Greetings, Martin