rp7420 and check power on un-assigned slot

[Coolmar]

Hi,

I have an rp7420 with two npars and 2 vpars on each npar. I have created a new vpar. The problem is that the state of the vpar is down and I cannot bring it up until disk is assigned by the SAN people. The problem is that the SAN people are saying that they cannot see the world wide name of the FC card. When I created the new vpar the FC card showed up as unassigned and I was able to assign it. So the SAN people say that they need the vpar up to see the WWN and therefore the FC card, and I cannot bring the vpar "up" without a boot disk. So it is somewhat of a catch22. I cannot bring it to an "up" state without booting, so I am wondering if maybe the slot is not powered up. When I go into Partition Manager and look at all the resources, the FC Card shows a state of "remote" and power as "?". However, the other vpars' FC cards show the same thing...all but the primary vpars show "remote" and "?". Is there a way to tell the power state of an i/o device? I know rad -q, but it only shows the devices assigned to the vpar you are running the command from. It doesn't show unassigned devices, or devices assigned to a vpar that is down.

Thanks!

[Stefan Stechemesser · Accepted solution]

Hi Sally,

I was not aware of the fact that the PCI slots in the rp7420 are not powered when a vpar is down.
You can check the power status of the PCI slot by looking at the PCI card itself.
If you unmount the top cover of the server (can be done online) you see a green LED on the powered slots. Because the LED itself is on the bottom of the PCI backplane and forwarded through a light pipe to the top, it should also be possible to see the light through the small holes in the back of the PCI backplane.

Regarding the WWN: It is normally written on the card, but you would have to unmount it (which can be done online if the slot is not powered).


To get the slot powered, I would recomend to boot the vpar via that fibre channel card. Although this will not work because of the zoning, the card must be powered on by the booting vpar and then the WWN should be visible.

Another method would be to reboot the npar without virtual partition by stopping the boot process in BCH, then "bo pri", interact with IPL y and "hpux -is" on the ISL prompt.
When you are in single user mode, you can run "mountall" and "ioscan -fnkC fc" to see the fibrechannel cards of the npar.
With "/opt/fcms/bin/fcmsutil /dev/td?" you get the WWN of the card (replace /dev/td? with the correct devicefile found in ioscan).

best regards

Stefan