FS for both HPUX and Linux

[YaaY]

Hi,

I ran into a problem in moving huge amount of data between HPUX11.11 and rhel5.

The best solution we thought of is using a SAN disk that will be connected both to the Unix and the Linux servers.

The problem is the FS type, is there any FS type which can be mounted both in Unix and Linux ?

From what I've searched there isn't one (will be very glad to find out I'm wrong), but I saw there is something called FreeVXFS, which lets me mount a vxfs FS on Linux, where can I find it ?

(the new "ITRC" is killing me...google find a lot of threads which leads no where...)

Thanks ahead,

Ilia.

[Dennis Handly]

>is there any FS type which can be mounted both in Unix and Linux?

There is NFS but you probably rejected that for being too slow.

[YaaY]

NFS was rejected for giving us 80M/s over 1G cross cable.

Copying 13T with 80M/s will make us wait for about 46 hours........

[Zinky]

Greetings!

I trust your need is for a Filesystem to be mountd on HP-UX, write massive amounts of data to it with whatever conversions needed (Endianess and all). Then once done, the filesystem is unmounted on HP-UX and mounted on Linux and data is "processed" there.

If so and you do not need simultaneous access on both HP-UX and Linux AND if your need is simply for data migration purposes (Oracle DB migration I suppose?) -- then the solution is to use the CDS features of Veritas Volume Manager and Filesystem sir.

You will need VxVM and VxFS on your HP-UX 11i environments. You will need to have SAN disks presented to both Linux and HP-UX. You create the VxVM DG in CDS mode (CDS is cross-platform data sharing - it allows Diskgroups to be moved from one platform to another). The volumes you create on top of the VxVM Diskgroup will ned to have VxFS on them. Once you write your data on HP-UX, you unmount the filesystem and you do a "vxfsfcdconvert" to convert the filesystem to little-Endian (Linux-X86) format. You then export the VxVM DG with its volumes and import on Linux. Mount up the VxFS filesystems and presto -- your HP-UX 11i data is now on Linux, properly byte-swapped (Endianness) and ready to be processed on Linux.

This is the method I architected to do our just concluded mega HP-UX to RHEL migration involving close to 100TB of Databases.

On Linux, VxVM/VxFS is free up for 1 DiskGroup and up to 4 volumes/filesystems only. Pretty sufficient for data migrations/conversions.

NOW, if you have 10GBE or can trunk several GigabitE NICs -- NFS *could* be a viable solution as well.

Hope this helps and guides you.

[Zinky]

you can trunk 3 more Gigabit Linkx and it will yield you 320GB/s -- much more bandwidth to saturate a dual 4Gbit FC DIsk Links to your SAN Storage.

[YaaY]

Thanks a lot.

I'm not familiar with the vxvmfcdconvert, which deport installs that command ? I only found vxvmconvert.

Let me understand if I got it right:

1. I create a regular vxfs FS on a device (I don't need LVM)

2. Put my data on the FS

3. umount

4. run the vxvmfcdconvert on the device

5. on the Linux, mount -t vxfs device mountpoint

right ?

[Alzhy]

And it is actually fscdconv

Here's the entire process:

UNIX to LINUX:

On UNIX:

1.)    Unmount the filesystem on UNIX.

root# umount /vxfloater1

2.)    Do the Endian Conversion or CDS conversion so filesystem on top of the volume is “mountable – r/w” on Linux.

root# /opt/VRTS/bin/fscdsconv -e -t os_name=Linux -f /root/vxfloater1.recov /dev/vx/dsk/vxfloater1/data

UX:vxfs fscdsconv: INFO: V-3-26040: Please verify if the following details identify the migration target for /dev/vx/dsk/vxfloater1/data:

Operating system          : Linux

Operating system version  : any

Architecture              : any

VxFS version              : any

Bits                      : 64

UX:vxfs fscdsconv: INFO: V-3-26037: Would you like to proceed further with migration? (ynq) y

UX:vxfs fscdsconv: INFO: V-3-26041: The filesystem would need to be byteswapped for use on this target.

UX:vxfs fscdsconv: INFO: V-3-26037: Would you like to proceed further with migration? (ynq) y

UX:vxfs fscdsconv: INFO: V-3-26130: There are no files violating the CDS limits for this target.

UX:vxfs fscdsconv: INFO: V-3-26047:  Byteswapping in progress ...

UX:vxfs fscdsconv: INFO: V-3-21842: Do you wish to commit to conversion? (ynq) y

UX:vxfs fscdsconv: INFO: V-3-26048: The filesystem has been byteswapped and is now ready for use on the specified target.

3.)    Deport the VxVM DiskGroup

root# vxdg deport vxfloater1

On LINUX:

4.)    Import the VXVM Diskgroup

root# vxdg import vxfloater1

5.)    Start the contained volume(s) in the transported Diskgroup

root# vxvol –g vxfloater1 startall

6.)    Mount the filesystem(s) on top of the volume to its corresponding mountpoint.

root# mount -t vxfs /dev/vx/dsk/vxfloater1/data /vxfloater1

# df -k /vxfloater1

Filesystem           1K-blocks      Used Available Use% Mounted on

/dev/vx/dsk/vxfloater1/data

                     4194106368    391896 4160951088   1% /vxfloater1

Data on the filesystem(s) on the transported VxVM DiskGroup from UNIX should now be natively readable/writable by LINUX at FULL SAN Speed

LINUX to UNIX:

On LINUX:

1.)    Unmount the filesystem on LINUX

root# umount /vxfloater1

2.)    Deport the VxVM DiskGroup

root# vxdg deport vxfloater1

On UNIX:

3.)    Import the VxVM DiskGroup

root# vxdg import vxfloater1

4.)    Start the contained volume(s) within the VxVM DiskGroup

root# vxvol –g vxfloater1 startall

5.)    Do the Endian Conversion or CDS conversion so filesystem on top of the volume is “mountable – r/w” once more on UNIX.

root# /opt/VRTS/bin/fscdsconv -i -f /root/vxfloater1.recov /dev/vx/dsk/vxfloater1/data

UX:vxfs fscdsconv: INFO: V-3-26036: The filesystem would need to be byteswapped for use on this machine.

UX:vxfs fscdsconv: INFO: V-3-26037: Would you like to proceed further with migration? (ynq) y

UX:vxfs fscdsconv: INFO: V-3-21842: Do you wish to commit to conversion? (ynq) y

6.)    Mount the filesystem(s) on top of the volume(s) that was/were converted.

root# mount /dev/vx/dsk/vxfloater1/data /vxfloater1

Data on the filesystem(s) on the transported VxVM DiskGroup from LINUX should now be natively readable/writable by UNIX at FULL SAN Speed.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

NFS 4 would probably do the trick. That would require HP-UX 11.31.

Also Symmatec should be consulted. They have CFS for HP-UX cluster file system. If you can provide SAN access to both systems you might find they have a CFS variant that works for Linux.

As far as speed goes, HP-UX and Linux both support 10G network infrastructure and channel bonding. You can get a heck of a lot of speed between the systems using a network based solution.

I would think make whichever system is prod the NFS or CIFS Master and let the slave system be the client. This can work, but it will cost you a few bucks.

SEP