HP-UX on Cisco SAN

[J Peak]

We have the following servers and HBAs that are going to be added to our existing SAN.
The hosts are 3440’s and a 4440 running HPUX 11.11
The HBAs are HP PCI-X-266 HP AB379-60101 4Gb Dual Port PCI/PCI-X

The switches are Cisco MDS 9509’s, running on v3.0(3)

We have other servers that are Windows running on IBM X-series and Solaris servers running on Sparc platforms using this same switch. Our target will be EMC symmetrix FA's and storage.

Are there any known gotchas with putting these boxes on the same VSAN as the Solaris & Windows boxes, or should we make these guys a separate VSAN?

I've been unable to find a compatibility list that covers our environment so far.

Thank you for any help and point in the right direction.

[krusty · Accepted solution]

Hi J,

One big gotcha I can think of off-hand would be that HP-UX uses the path to the storage to create the device files. If the path changes, the devices files change, and you loose access to the storage.

By default Cisco hands out FCIDs (aka PIDs) in a "DHCP" fashion, so the FCIDs can change with each FLOGI. You can prevent this behavior at the VSAN level by using the fcdomain command. I don't recall the commend you use to check is FCID is "persistant", and I'm but where I can check. This is assuming that you create a VSAN 10.

fcdomain fcid persistent vsan 10

Hope this helps...

Curt

[skt_skt]

who changes the path so often :) : Also with LVM we dont need to worry about the paths as vg cna be imported with vgid in path change situation.