Auto path switch on VMS with MSA1000/MSA1500

[Malcolm Dunnett]

I have a dual controller MSA1000 running in active/active mode connected to a VMS 7.3-2 cluster (Alphaserver ES40s). If I do a $SHOW device/fu on one of the disks I see two paths to it (one on each controller). However if I disable the controller on the MSA1000 that is serving the current path I get a "no path" error and can't access the disk. If I then do a $SET DEVICE/PATH=xxxxx/SWITCH to manually tell VMS to talk to the other path I can see this disk again. Shouldn't VMS automatically switch to the other path when the current path fails? Both ports on the MSA1000 go into a fibrechannel switch which also connects to an HBA (KGPSA) on the Alphaserver. Is feeding both of them into the same HBA adapter on VMS the problem, do I need to use a second switch and HBA to get the failover to work?

[Volker Halle]

Malcolm,

your running V7.x firmware and are up-to-date with FIBRE_SCSI patches ?

Did you pull out the controller for the current path ?

Volker.

[Malcolm Dunnett]

I am almost up-to-date on FIBRE_SCSI patches. I have V10 installed, I see V11 was recently released. I've read the abstract for it and it doesn't appear it addresses this issue, but you never know.

To remove the controller I did a "disable other_controller" from the other controller console port then I pulled the controller out (I wanted to change the cache batteries which is what started all this)