Persistent Binding...

[Coolmar]

We keep losing the path to our IBM tape drives and they are suggesting persistent binding. It cannot be done at the OS level by HP but they say that we have to do it somehow on the firmware of the HBA. Has anyone heard of this and can it be done. Our cards are Tachyon XL2 cards.

Quoted from IBM:
There are two levels of persisten binding: driver level and operating system level. On IBM servers this advanced configuration is set via HBA utilities such as SAN Surfer or FASTMSJ. OF course this varies dependent on the manufacturer of the Host Bus Adapter that is being used. As an example I have included both an excerpt from and the actual document discussing HP-UX implementation on an Emulex HBA:
* At the Emulex lpfc driver level, persistent binding can guarantee that target assignments are preserved between reboots, provided the same devices are present. An FC device may bind to a predefined ID based on teh FC device's WWPN, WWNN, or D_ID.
* At the OS level, this predefined ID becomes the hardware path of the FC LUN. HP-UX uses this ID to preserve the mapping between the I/O object and a set of special device files. To view the mapping, run the ioscan command.
* The lpfc.conf file, located in the /opt/lpfc/conf directory, contains persistent binding variables as well as all of the variables that control driver utilization.

[Coolmar]

fORGOT i already had one open on this ...Sorry