APA

[Alexander Pino, Sr.]

Is there anyone out there who's using Auto-port Aggregation? If so, I'd like some feed-back, i.e., do you recommend it? easy to install? effectiveness?

[G. Vrijhoeven]

Hi,

We are about to configure it so i am interested as well. I did search in the technical knowledge base here are the results:

http://www5.itrc.hp.com/service/cki/search.do?category=c0&mode=text&searchString=apa&searchCrit=allwords&docType=Security&docType=Patch&docType=EngineerNotes&docType=BugReports&docType=Hardware&docType=ReferenceMaterials&docType=ThirdParty

Gideon

[Alzhy]

APA is not just an aggregation/trunking software -- it also protects against network equipment failures... We have embraced it as a standard on all our HPUX systems since we are working on an SLA environment. We are hooked up to dual switches so there is absolutely no single point of failure.

APA can be used to trunk/aggregate Network connections -- talk with your switch people if they understand LacP/PagP. If you will only be after it's redundancy/protection features - they you'll be running in what's called "manual" mode -- you'll still be protected against cable,switch and NIC failure -- you would not just get the aggregation.

Highly recomended...

[Geoff Wild]

Here's some info from testing we did:

1- A lan900 group was created including 2 network interfaces lan0 and lan1 which were connected to separate network switches. While system was up and running, we unplugged the cable from lan0, system re-established the network connectivity on lan1 after failover interval of 10 seconds. Ping and Telnet were used to check successful connectivity after fail over.

Cable was plugged in to the lan0, took out cable from lan1 interface and it failed over back to lan0 automatically.

2- While both cables were connected, port on each switch disabled alternatively to interrupt the NW connectivity, APA failed over the LAN to Stand by interface successfully.

Rgds...Geoff

[Alzhy]

I forgot to mention.. configuration is VERY easy -- specialy in SAM. For Aggregation configurations --ie. when you want to trunk say 2 NIC's as just 1 SuperNIC (ie. 2 GBPS link out of 2 x 1 GBPS NICs) you'll need to check with your network folks and have them configure the switch accordingly... they should be aware of PagP (port aggregation protocol) or LacP (link aggregation protocol..).... When running in aggregation mode, you'll ot only get increased bandwidth but protection. When one member of the link aggregate fails -- you survive but with the bandwdith of whatever NIC's are left..

Very effective in NAS implementations and iSCSI deployments - I might add...

[PVR]

It is very effective and easy to implement

Install APA software. After configuring the driver for lan cards, goto sam and configure APA. it is self explanatory.

For better redundancy;
1. connect diff interfaces to different switches.

2. If u want load balancing your switch should support it (link aggregation protocol)

[Brian Markus]

This is EXTREMLY important for all APA users!!!

Patch PHNE_28777 APA cumulative patch can and most likely will break your machine.

Last week I had networking die after applying this patch.

The patch alters what lines are required in the following files:

/etc/rc.config.d/hp_apaconf
/etc/rc.config.d/hp_apaportconf

In the patch â Special Install Instructionsâ says that there is a new parameter, and you can get a new configuration file from /usr/newconfig/etc/rc.config.d/hp_apaconf However, it doesn't say much more than that. You need to look in the hp_apaportconf file and make the mode in that file equal to the mode in the hp_apaconf file. Here is what I set mine to in the /etc/rc.config.d/hp_apaconf

HP_APA_DEFAULT_PORT_MODE=MANUAL

I wanted to throw this up someplace for everyone to see.

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