Moving L-class (A5158A) from brocade switch to hub

[Eric Thiessen]

I am attempting to move an L-class with 2 A5158A cards from 2 brocade switches to one brocade switch and one hub (one switch is needed for a different project and I'd like to maintain dual paths to emc. I would like to do this without rebooting the server if possible. I have tried moving the connections and reseting the card that was moved, as well as disabling it and reenabling it. The card and the port on the hub just continually reset. Any ideas?

[Michael Tully]

Hi Eric,

I've never attempted to plug into a
hub with a HBA card. Anyway last weekend
I moved an L class with two HBA cards
from one switch and split it to two.
I didn't get get any card resets as I
has the system down. What I can tell
you is that if you change the hardware
that you are plugging into, the paths
to the hardware will change (hardware
and device info), so before attempting
to do anything make sure you have done
a vgexport -m vg.mapfile -p -v /dev/vgxx
It will save some heartache for you.
Now you can change the ports etc on
the fly, I've done this also, but you
will have the same potential problem
as I've just mentioned. To see any
new hardware you will need to run a
few ioscans and the new pathing should
appear. Once this is done and no actual
disk drive devices appear, but you have
hardware pathing, run 'insf -e' from
/dev

HTH
-Michael

[Eric Thiessen]

Michael,

Thanks for the info. I'll go ahead and do the exports just to be on the safe side. I am running the hub to the same controller on the emc, so I don't think I'll have any disk device changes.

Right now, I can't even get the Fibre card and hub to link.

[Johan Nielsen]

Keep in mind that switching to a hub implies arbitrated loop as oppose to switched fabric. If you had your Brocade port set to QuickLoop then this may not be an issue. In general I don't know that i would recommend this move but rather leave the server connected to the Brocade switch and then connect the hub to the switch and zone if accordingly. Just a thought.

Johan

[Eric Thiessen]

Thanks to Michael and Johan for responding. We ended up contacting EMC and there was a moderate amount of reconfiguring necessary on the EMC. This was out of scope for our project and we have taken a step back to reevaluate.

[Vincent Fleming]

The hub is the only thing between your host and the EMC then... right? I bet they want to hit you up for a bin file to change to loop mode on that port.

Did you know that you can do this yourself on the XP512?

Good luck

[Eric Thiessen]

You are correct Vincent. EMC also believes that the our server would have to be rebooted also. I think we can probably get around that. We'll see once the bin file changes are made.