OS seeing too many paths to storage

[davidbruno]

Hi, our EVA 6400 controllers have 1 connection to each fabric (see attached picture). For some reason the Solaris 10 OS natively sees 4 paths to each vdisk. With 12 vdisks on the server, that’s 48 paths, which can become unmanageable. Veritas correctly displays 2 paths per vdisk but there are some functions we want to perform natively (OS level, no Veritas). In other words we expect to see 2 paths just as with our XP disk array environment. Have you come across this? Any suggestions? The SAN switches are Brocade 5100s.

Your help is appreciated.

Thanks!

[Johan Guldmyr]

Hi,

but are your servers on both fabrics? Then they will see two paths for each fabric because there are two host ports from the EVA6400 per fabric.

Isn't there multipath in Solaris 10?

[chris huys_4]

Hi,

You should see 4 paths per eva lun.

Veritas, I suppose you mean vxvm, with its 2 paths per eva lun, is the one who is showing it wrong. (vxdisk -o alldgs list;vxdisk list <disk> should show 2 primary and 2 standby paths in the multipathing section, if not maybe the asl is not installed)

As Johan said, its not the  vdisk "links" to each of the 2 eva controller that counts, but the number of vdisk "links" to the front end fc hba's.

I.e. there are 4 total front-end fc hba connections , so there are 4 paths for each lun.

If you would "san design out the XP storage" you would probably see that the xplun only "connects" to 2 (primary) xp-"front end fc hba's ports" and thus has only 2 paths per disk.

And solaris 10 has also its free MPIO multipathing.

Greetz,

Chris