FATA drives not showing up in Solaris

[Keith C. Patterson]

Hello all,
I am unable to see any FATA drives from my EVA on my Solaris machine. I can however, see all Fibre Channel drives.
sd.conf has proper entries, LUNS are mapped and secured properly.
I'm baffled. Any ideas?

Thanks.

P.S. this thread has been moved from General to Storage Area Networks (SAN) (Enterprise). - Hp Forum Moderator

[Alzhy]

I trust your question really meant -- "I cannot see the presented FATA based vdisks on my Solaris machine but I can see the FC-based vdisks" ?

AFAIK, there should be no difference in the way Vdisks are presented/seen by the host/server. Did you check that your Vdisks from your FATA diskgroups are fine?

[Keith C. Patterson]

Yes, that is correct.
I do have a suspicion though; the HBA's in the SUN box are SUN branded and use the ssd driver I believe. This is a fibre channel driver as opposed to sd. Perhaps the ssd driver is unable to complete SCSI inquiry to FATA drives.

[Alzhy]

There should be no difference..

BTW, let me ask you.. are these FATA based vdisks coming out of the same existing EVA that is alredy recognized by the Solaris machine? Or do they come from a new EVA not yet recognized?

IIRC, if you present a new array, you will need to reboot the system with at least one presented LUN before you can do any subsequent presentations.

Hope this helps..

[Uwe Zessin]

The Solaris host has no idea what physical drives are mounted inside the EVA - it cannot look 'through' the EVA's virtualization layer.

[Alzhy]

Keith.. do you even understand the concepts behind the EVA? i.e. what a vdisk is?

The vdisk is a virtualized chunk of several individual disks forming a diskgroup inside your EVA. Your server/host do not see the actual physical component disks but rather the virtualized/RAIDed chunks of your "diskgroup".

So if you have 250GB FATA disks inside your EVA.. you will not see these individual disks but rather virtualized/RAIDed componenets called "vdisks" that may be on several of these individual disks..

[Keith C. Patterson]

Yes thank you I do realize what this is.
The host still needs to do a SCSI inquiry to the LUN whether it is a combination of multiple disks or just a single disk reprented as one LUN (vdisk).

[Alzhy]

BTW, what kind of EVA is this?

If it is EVA4/6/8K an dyou're not using SecurePath or are simply using DMP (VxVM?) -- then it is possible your sd.conf file do not reflect the lun/target numbers properly.

On SOlaris machines, each SCSI target can accomodate up to 255 LUN numbers. Make sure you have at least LUN 0 to 255 defined for each target 0 to 4 - That should be sufficient. Note that you will need to reboot your Solaris machine (if Solaris 8/9) to have the sd.conf take effect.

Can you post your sd.conf and the current output of format (showing the disks currently seen)?

[Keith C. Patterson]

As I stated above, sd.conf has all appropriate entries. You do not need to reboot Solaris 9 now as you can dynamically update sd driver with sd.conf file by running the command:
add_drv

I have attached both files. You may notice that the format output looks a little strange.
Believe it or not this customer is not using any dual pathing software including SecurePath or DMP and have a single HBA mapped to two of the EVA controllers. Bad idea, I realize and have informed them of this. They have budget problems.

However, they are only using and mounting devices: c9t9d11, c9t9d12, c9t9d13, c9t9d14.

Don't be confused if you see other devices down the c8 controller. They are using another array down that path.

I do realize that this is not the optimal way to run a SAN but I don't see why the FATA drives (LUNS, vdisks, however you want to describe them), are not showing up but the Fibre Channel drives are.

I will be heading back to the customer site over the next couple of days to double check the array, host, etc. My colleague who has a lot of EVA experience has informed me that the EVA is configured correctly with all vdisks representing FATA drives being presented properly.

All of this leads me to believe it might have someting to do with the Solaris HBA/driver not being able to complete a full SCSI inquiry to the FATA devices thereby not showing up in format.
I have seen weirder things so I'm not discounting the possibility altogether.

Thanks for the assistance.

[Uwe Zessin]

I guess you are running the EVA with VCS V3.something firmware. If that is true, the controllers are working in an Active/Passive mode for each individual virtual disk. That means one controller is owning the virtual disk and you can do I/O through its host ports.

The other controller presents the corresponding LUNs as well, but a inquire is responded with a "not ready" state. The LUNs must be presented, however, so that the multipath software (Secure Path) knows about this 'standby paths' it can fail over.

I suggest that you check and make sure that the virtual disk(s) in the FATA disk group are owned by the same controller like the FC drive disk group. Use the "controller A/B - failover/failback" setting to make sure that a virtual disk does not move.

[Alzhy]

Interesting...

So you've an EVA, presented to only 1 HBA -- which is fully supported. And you use port binding in sd.conf. Are the new FATA based vdisks coming from a new EVA5K or the same EVA5K? If it comes from a new EVA5K - then I have never been able to have new EVAs be recognised by any OS w/o a reboot..

I will still try to populate sd.conf with appropirate target/lun entries w/o the binding - just simple :

name="sd" class="scsi" target=X lun=Y;

for X=0 to say 10 and Y=0 to 255

And reboot...