Are USB External Hard Drives Supported on Itanium HP-UX

[john guardian]

I'm pretty sure of the answer, but was directed to ask just in case.

Thanks in advance for any/all responses.

[Steven E. Protter · Accepted solution]

Shalom,

Most off the shelf USB hard disks are not supported by HP. It is possible to use them, even boot a system off of them. However I see nothing on the support matrix.

SEP

[VK2COT]

Hello,

If you use HP-UX 11.31, it will work.
I actually did it first back in 2007.

To be frank, I am not using older HP-UX
releases for several years now, so I
do not worry about them any more.

I use them when I teach HP-UX courses
regularly. In fact, USB drives saved
me several times when I was not able
to get access to SAN LUNs to build
ServiceGuard clusters with Oracle.

So, I bought 200-dollar USB drive,
installed 10 Integrity Virtual Machines
in around 20 minutes and then built
five 2-node ServiceGuard cluster with
Oracle.

One mid-range server allowed me to
create five small clusters in less than two hours :)

So, go for USB drives on HP-UX 11.31.
They might die quickly, but that is another
story.

Cheers,

VK2COT

[john guardian]

OK, so you installed the USB drive on 11.31.

Is there anything in particular (kernel params, drivers, etc) req'd, or IE: will SAM simply recognize these generic devices as raw disk and init for LVM/HFS?

Thx.

[VK2COT]

Nothing special to do for USB disks on HP-UX 11.31 (apart from typical LVM or VxVM tasks
to configure the volumes).

And note that HP-UX 11.31 does not have SAM.
SMH (System Management Homepage) is the GUI.

Cheers,

VK2COT

[VK2COT]

Hello,

Here is an example of how legacy ioscan(1M)
looks like on HP-UX 11.31 DCOE March 2010.
The PV is actually an extrnal 200GB Maxtor
USB drive:

usbmsvbus 1 255/1 mass_storage CLAIMED VIRTBUS USB Mass Storage
ext_bus 10 255/1/0 usb_ms_scsi CLAIMED INTERFACE USB Mass Storage SCSI
target 5 255/1/0.0 tgt CLAIMED DEVICE
disk 7 255/1/0.0.0 sdisk CLAIMED DEVICE Maxtor 3200
/dev/dsk/c10t0d0 /dev/rdsk/c10t0d0

The agile-to-legacy mapping is:

/dev/rdisk/disk10 -> /dev/rdsk/c10t0d0

And diskinfo(1M):

SCSI describe of /dev/rdsk/c10t0d0:
vendor: Maxtor
product id: 3200
type: direct access
size: 199148544 Kbytes
bytes per sector: 512

Very easy and simple :)

Cheers,

VK2COT

[Torsten.]

>> Are USB External Hard Drives Supported on Itanium HP-UX


AFAIK this is still not supported, even if it sometimes work.

[VK2COT]

Hello Torsten,

Officially, you are right. HP does not
state anywhere that it supports it (I should
know, I work for HP) :)

However, over the last three years,
I have used USB disk drives on different
HP-UX 11.31 around 35-40 times.
Not once they failed (even when I used
the cheapest type of USB disk drives
that might had come from some dodgy
manufacturer). So, my personal
success rate with USB disk drive is 100%.

Like Integrity Virtual Machines,
Red Hat and SuSE do not officially support HP virtualization for Linux although it
works very well (I use it all the time).

Sometimes, official certification process
is more complex...

Anyway, if you want to try it, it is easy.
If you are worried about HP maintenance
contract, do not do it, or ask your HP support team for official clarification.

Cheers,

VK2COT

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Just to add to the comments already here...

Although people have had some good experiences with USB hard drives, the same cannot be said for USB memory sticks... I'm aware of at least a couple of customers who managed to bring down their Integrity system by inserting/removing an "unsupported" memory stick. There are some HP badged USB sticks which are officially supported, but apart from that...

So take the "not supported" message seriously - if you attach an unsupported device to your system and it panics it, then I suspect HP support will do no more than reasonable effort looking at the problem (or they may just tell you not to connect it again!)

With apologies to Rick Jones for mercilessly plagiarising him:

>Supported, known to work -> warm fuzzies all around
>Supported, not known to not work -> an HPite may be in trouble
>Supported, known to not work -> an HPite is in trouble
>Unsupported, known to work -> lucky today, unlucky tomorrow?
>Unsupported, not known to not work -> there but for the grace of Turing
>Unsupported, known to not work -> no, it was not deliberate ;-)

HTH

Duncan

[works2late]

I have had trouble getting a USB drive configured on an rx2620 (HPUX 11iV3) system.

We are a development shop without extra capacity to back things up properly. Due to an unrelated snafu, we have to ship out one of our systems and I want to make sure we have serviceable backups before we lose this system.

The USB configuration from ioscan -fn without the drives installed:

OO 0 0/0/1/0 UsbOhci CLAIMED INTERFACE USB OHCI Interface
OO 1 0/0/1/1 UsbOhci CLAIMED INTERFACE USB OHCI Interface
OO 2 0/0/1/2 UsbEhci CLAIMED INTERFACE USB EHCI Interface


The USB configuration with two different USB installed (500 GB and 1.5 TB):


OO 0 0/0/1/0 UsbOhci CLAIMED INTERFACE USB OHCI Interface
OO 3 0/0/1/0.1 UsbMiniBus CLAIMED INTERFACE USB Composite Device
unknown -1 0/0/1/0.1.0 UNCLAIMED UNKNOWN OO Device Driver
OO 1 0/0/1/1 UsbOhci CLAIMED INTERFACE USB OHCI Interface
OO 6 0/0/1/1.1 UsbMiniBus CLAIMED INTERFACE USB Composite Device
unknown -1 0/0/1/1.1.0 UNCLAIMED UNKNOWN OO Device Driver
OO 2 0/0/1/2 UsbEhci CLAIMED INTERFACE USB EHCI Interface


There are no entries in the /dev/deviceFileSystem directory for those disks ... how do I access the drives to configure them?

One drive is an HP laptop-size disk (500GB). The other is a Seagate FreeAgent (1.5TB). Both are formated with NTFS out of the box.

[works2late]

FYI, here is more information about the USB config, from HPUX:


NOTICE: USB device attached. Identification String:
Devices/Device/USB/Standard/UnknownVendor/Unknown/0_0
<2.1.3.10.3010.12289.0>
NOTICE: USB device attached. Identification String:
Devices/MassStorage-SCSI/USB/BulkOnly/UnknownVendor/Unknown/0_0
<2.310.3.150.3010.12289.0>

[john guardian]

Appreciate all the responses. With passing this info on to mgmt, I'd like to think that an unsupported scenario (with PANIC) will sway them to a more reasonable decision.