Secure Path with HP storage works

[hpuxhelp]

Hi,
Have anyone works with Secure Path? The fundamental seems to be like Pvlinks, but the setup itself rather like SDD (IBM products). I have a question in regards to creation of a vg. In pvlinks, we create a vg and specified with controller will be our primary link..with this, will this work the same for the secure Path?

[John Payne_2 · Accepted solution]

With secure path, secure path controls the device name. If you do a 'spmgr display' it will tell you the device name for each lun. i.e. c8t0d0 is lun 1, and the associated device file is /dev/dsk/c8t0d0. There is nothing special about it from the system side. The reason for secure path is that you may have 2 HBA's, and you can throw the lun down both pipes, and secure path gives the device file and controls which HBA the disks 'come from.' Secure path can fail over to the other HBA without changing your device files and screwing up your system.

So if that is your device, create the VG as you would normally, i.e.:

pvcreate /dev/rdsk/c8t0d0
mkdir /dev/vg61
mknod /dev/vg61 group c 64 0x0n0000 (n is unique)
vgcreate /dev/vg61 /dev/dsk/c8t0d0

And so on...

Hope it helps

John

[John Payne_2]

oops. That's
mknod /dev/vg61/group c 64 0x0n0000

John

(Let me know if you have other questions. We have been using secure path on HPUX since it was beta for HPUX...)

[hpuxhelp]

So as you said, there is no primary link vs secondary link?
with pvlink, I guess i/o will reroute to the available path,
but still didn't change the device file...
so if I do vgdisplay , I would know just see one disk...
how did you set up yours?
....
can we set up pvlink using HGS
storage ????
---
how would it know which controller will be the preferred path on a particular disk?

[John Payne_2]

Yep, Secure path takes care of it, there is no need to worry. If the LUNs are presented properly to the server, and the secure path driver is in, you will just see the 1 lun in vgdisplay/ioscan/etc.

There should be no need to use pvlinks, just let secure path do it's thing. It can provide failover all the way back to the disks if you have 2 HBA's. It can also load balance at the Controller for the Storage Works. (Making it easier to read or write to disk with potentially less I/O waits.)

A 'spmgr display' will show you what luns you have, their paths, which HBA is active, etc. It is really slick.

This is how we implement: Our SAN guy serves up a lun, I do an 'ioscan -fnCdisk', and it sees the lun. Then you go to see what secure path sees in spmgr. After that, I create a vg, and lv's. It really it nice.

Hope it helps

John

[hpuxhelp]

Thanks John,
I have a standalone system, currently doesn't have secure path , what is the easiest way to add the Secure path on and add these existing device to Secure Path?

[hpuxhelp]

What are the path_Instance?
and how is that related to the device ???

[John Payne_2]

Path_Instance is a controller path (from the EVA/EMA) It has nothing to do with the HPUX system itself, but with the SAN. You can see it from the HPUX side, and can see when one of your controllers fails from the system.

The driver is availble from the storageworks people. It is installed as SD packaged depot, but updates the kernel and forces a reboot. After the reboot, secure path activates.

http://h18000.www1.hp.com/products/sanworks/softwaredrivers/securepath/index.html has links to the secure path drivers and updates. (You have to match your servers environment and SAN firmware to the right SW package. look at the description before installing...)

Hope it helps.

John

[Spike Burkhardt]

John,

This is a bit off the track but can Secure Path 3.x be installed on a hpux 11.0 box that only has 1 hba?

[hpuxhelp]

Hi John,
So like you said, instance_path has everythings on how one configure on the san...but if I run ioscan...i will see 4 instance path per device..is this correct?

[John Payne_2]

Well, it didn't display like I had hoped. I hope you get the point. If not, I couldproblably talk to you off-line about it.

John