Multiple Paths appearing off of same Fiber HBA

[JAguilar]

What could be causing my Fabric A6586A card on my K570 to show me 4 times as many hard disks from my EVA 3000. Any help is appreciated.

I'm running HPUX 11.11 on a K570 I have 7 disks presented to it but actually see 28 disks out there when I run a IOSCAN |more or IOSCAN -funC disk.

Thanks,
Jose

[Patrick Wallek]

Are they all active? Do any of them show as "NO_HW"? How many connections from your fibre switch to the EVA do you have? Is zoning OK?

[JAguilar]

I only have 1 path to the eva and they are all displaying as Claimed. My zoning looks Ok, I had my senior look over it after I did as well.

[Patrick Wallek]

Maybe something in the EVA configuration with the way the LUNs are presented? Have you checked the EVA?

[JAguilar]

I'm going to check it again. I am not doing anything different than i normally would for our other RP7410 when I present disk to it. But the whole path thing has me intrigued. from the EVA to the switch there are physically 4 connections. From my HBA to the switch there is only 1 connection. I'll have to get back to you on my findings.

[TwoProc]

Well, you answered it yourself.

Those are all the alternate paths through the switch to the disk. Your one card can take any one of four paths through the switch to get to each disk (lun). This is a good thing, make sure to take advantage of it when putting your extents out there (hint: use distributed striping across PVG's) and make sure that the alternate paths are all defined for each disk in each VG. This can help you get uptime in case of failure of a gbic in the switch or on the EVA, and with interleaving, can help get you balance the switch for performance.