MA8000 - DILX utility

[Christian Schwartz-Søre]

Does anyone have any field expertice using this utility ?
If I run it on a specific LUN (all data is erased), and not on the entire storage system, can it be used while the other LUN's are online with different preferred paths to the dual HSG80 controllers ?

Does anyone have any documentation on its use ?

Regards
Christian

[TADANG]

Hi Christian,

DilX generates intense read/write loads to the unit while monitoring drive performance and status. You can run DilX on as many units as desired, but since this utility creates substancial I/O loads on the controller, HP recommands stopping all I/O acitvity during the test.
Running DILX depends on what you would like to monitor : Read capacity?Read and write?

You may use this utility with a lot of precaution.


Maurice

[Mike Naime · Accepted solution]

Experience has show that running DILX will cause your other LUNS to loose connectivity (Windoze) because the storage controller is hammering the LUNS being tested. VMS and TRU64 will survive without crashing your system (Drives go into mount verify, and come back) W2K is toast!

The cautions all over the software say that you should not perform this task on a LIVE system. I.E. If you loose connectivity, don't blame us, we warned you!

[Christian Schwartz-Søre]

Basically, I need to test just one LUN.

According to the customer advisory: OD010710_CW01

DILX is the tool to use, in order to remove the 8MB EISA partition, created at manufacturing of the harddrive.

The LUN in question needs to have that partition removed by overwriting it using the DILX utility.

If the system could remain online, and the remaining LUNs unaffected only suffering a slight performance impact, that would be preferable.

Would that be possible practically ?

Regards
Christian

[Mike Naime]

Run DILX for the minimal amount of time. That is what I do for initializing the new LUNS that I have to make. (Unless it is a NEW storage controller)

[Christian Schwartz-Søre]

Tell me Mike,
do you take the other LUNs in your system offline, before running DILX, even for a minimal amount of time, or do you leave access to the them ?

Regards
Christian

[Rob_164]

I have used DILX on numerous occasions on live systems when needing to clean down particular units. Like the previous post stated, use with care and in my experience - only a few seconds are required.

[James Dwyer]

We've run it a few times on our live system. The HPaq engineers we spoke with recommended 5 minutes for our run time. We haven't yet had a problem with it but have only had to do this a few times on a not excessively utilized MA8000 system. I've attached the log of our session below

[Mike Naime]

The last time that I setup some LUNS, I setup 3 clusters worth of LUNS on a new HSG. I later had to swap some drives when they wanted the SQL cluster built. When I ran DILX that time, one of 2 clusters on that system had a problem. We later added another LUN, and ran DILX without any problems using 1 minute as the run time.

The first pass overwrites the partition data. Anything past this is unnecessary.