Teaming Fiber Cards

[ejimenez]

Is it possible to team fiber cards? Thanks.

[Duncan Edmonstone]

what sort of fiber cards?

If you mean fiber GbE (1000BaseFX) or 10GbE, then yes, using APA (although you can only team 10GbE for resilience, not for increased bandwidth).

If you are referring to fibre channel HBAs for mass storage then NO, you don't team the card... but HP-UX is capable of supporting multiple paths to the storage out of the cards... how it works depends on the version of HP-UX - what version are you working with?

HTH

DUncan

[Kuntal Gupta]

Dear Mr. Duncun,

Would you pls brief the diff between fiber GbE (for which APA can be configured) and fibre channel HBAs for mass storage (for which APA can NOT be configured).

I am having "PCI/PCI-X Fibre Cahnnel 2-port 4Gb FC/2-port 1000B-T Combo adapter", how should confirm my card will support APA.

Thanks....

Kuntal

[Patrick Wallek]

>>Fibre Cahnnel 2-port 4Gb

This is fibre channel for storage. So you CANNOT use APA with this.

[Torsten.]

Depending on the OS version or if special storage drivers are in use the system will load balancing across different fibre channel cards - you can compare this to NIC teaming.

[hvhari]

Multipathing software/driver is used for disk storage systems which can be configured to increase the bandwidth to storage access and/or utilise them for fault tolerance. This is very much similar to teaming in NIC .

Multipathing software/driver can be storage specific (eg. secure path for EVA/XP) or the OS may have this feature embedded.

[Alzhy]

"I am having "PCI/PCI-X Fibre Cahnnel 2-port 4Gb FC/2-port 1000B-T Combo adapter", how should confirm my card will support APA."

This means that you have a COMBO card with 2 FC-Ports (for SAN/Storage) and 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports (for LAN/Network).

The LAN ports on these cards are treated normally just like any other Network only NIC cards -- they canbe aggregate (or TEAM'ed via APA software). The ports are NOT Fibre capable -- thy're copper normal RJ45 network connections!

The FC Ports on these cards are ONLY for Storage/SAN connections. They CANNOT be "teamed"... your multipathing software (11.31's Mass Storage Stack, or the SAN Array's proprietary software or VxVM DMP) is responsible for load balancing and redundancy accross your FC ports on these cards.

Now on other OSes, you DO have FIBRE HBAs that can also carry ethernet/IP traffic as do the SAN Switches that they connecto to -- but is becoming rare as 10GbE prices aer falling.

HTH.