Emulex fiber channel card won't failover to alternate PVlink path

[Kevin Gee]

I have two Emulex LP9002-F2 fiber channel cards (HP Certified Third Party product)in an L Class server running HP-UX 11.11 which properly shows two paths via PVLinks to a SAN disk array.

When I remove the primary link fiber cable, the system does not fail over to the alternate path. The dd commands running into the file system pause and start back up when the primary is reconnected.

Has anyone successfully used these cards in a PVLinks failover?

Thanks for your time in advance.

[Steven E. Protter]

Can you generate some reports on your error and setup.

There should be messages in /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log

It would be nice to see lvm reports on the pvlinks setup.

For some reason, I'm blanking on which report. I've got some testing to do, and will check back later.

SEP

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi Kevin,

can we assume you are using it on the logical volume not the PV?

-Sri

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Kevin,

Just *how* long are you waiting for failover.
Depending on timeout settings, this could be several minutes or more.
Do an
lvdisplay -v /dev/vg_name/lv_name | more
to check the timeout value. There's also a timeout value for the PV as well, I believe.
These timeouts are designed to prevent unnecessary switches due to purely load induced delays and setting it properly is frequently a fine line to walk.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Kevin Gee]

We have discovered the problem here.

Linkdown-tmo was set to 60 and no_device_delay was set to 30.

The combinations of these two delays caused the PVLinks to get in such a state that they never failed over.

I waited for one hour until resetting the kernel parameters to defaults.

All is now working properly.

Thanks for everyone's input.

[Kevin Gee]

Works great.