Upgrading to FC10

[Thomas Luong]

We have a K380 running 10.20. We will be adding an FC10 with 2 fiber channel controllers. The FC10 has 10 x 18Gig drives. The drives will be mirrored with alternate paths to them.

We would like to setup 5 mirrored volumes groups with 60 logical volumes.

Has anyone done a similar upgrade and has written a script to create the volume groups and logical volumes with alternate paths included? Thanks.

Thomas

[John Palmer]

Thomas,

You'll need to ensure that you have the relevant fibre channel patches applied.

After that though there isn't any difference in setting up FC10 disks to plain old SCSI ones.

Why do you want to have five volume groups? I'd consider putting all 10 disks in a single VG. This would allow you more flexibility for striping as well as mirroring.

Alternate paths are created by simply vgextending the second path to the disk into the VG. The first of a pair added is the primary and the second the alternate path. You need to balance your I/O over your FC controllers by alternating the order that you add disks to the VG such that half the primaries are on one channel and half on the other.

So say your one set of disks are c4t0d0 to c4t9d0 and the other is c5t0d0 to c5t9d0 you would create your VG with:-
vgcreate vg?? /dev/dsk/c4t0d0 /dev/dsk/c5t0d0 /dev/dsk/c5t1d0 /dev/c4t1d0 /dev/dsk/c4t2d0 ...

You might also like to consider adding -e 9000 to vgcreate so that your VG will accomodate 36Gb disks without having to be rebuilt.

The method of logical volume creation depends on what type you want but they are easy enough to script.

Regards,
John