connecting EVA to RHEL5: OS steps

[Yaboto]

I have freshly installed a RHEL5. What are the steps to perform at the RedHat Enterprise Linus OS level to connect it to an EVA storage through FC SAN.
Please help.

Regards,

[Matti_Kurkela · Accepted solution]

You did not specify the make and model of your FC HBA cards, so here are the steps in a generalized form:

1.) Find out the WWN number(s) of your FibreChannel HBA card(s).

The WWN number is like the MAC address on network cards, but longer.

You can find the WWN by:
- physically reading the WWN labels on your HBA card(s)

- reading the information provided by the driver at /proc/scsi//* or /sys/class/fc_host/hostN/* files, if the RHEL 5 distribution includes the drivers for your HBA(s)

- installing the appropriate HBA driver and tools and using them to discover HBA information, if the driver is not included in RHEL 5

2.) Plug in the FC cable(s). Make sure the physical FC connections are OK and the FC cards are detecting a link once the system is powered up.

3.) Talk to your SAN admin. Say something like: "My new system is a RHEL 5, with Qlogic/Emulex/whatever HBA model X. The WWN numbers are xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx:xx and yy:yy:yy:yy:yy:yy:yy:yy.
Please present me N GB of storage space." The SAN admin may ask you for more information, but s/he will need at least all this.

4.) When the SAN admin presents the new LUN to your system, RHEL 5 is likely to detect it automatically. If this does not happen, you must trigger a storage re-scan. For more information, see RedHat Online Storage Reconfiguration Guide:

http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/html/Online_Storage_Reconfiguration_Guide/index.html

5.) You should now see one or more new /dev/sd* devices. If you see more than you expected, you may need multipath storage support. If you have two or more FC connections to your storage, you *will* need multipath storage support.

There are multiple options for that: RedHat naturally recommends their own DM-Multipath, an optional (free) component of RHEL. Your site policy might require using EVA-specific HP SecurePath instead.

Please read the DM-Multipath manual:
http://www.redhat.com/docs/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/5.4/html/DM_Multipath/index.html

6.) Use your new (possibly multipathed) disk devices as you would use an ordinary local disk: partition them, set them up for LVM or use them as raw disks according to your requirements.

MK

[Jimmy Vance]

You asked the same exact question in another thread.

get the "Device Mapper Multipath Enablement Kit for HP StorageWorks Disk Arrays" and download the latest release for your Linux distribution

http://www.hp.com/go/devicemapper

Inside the .tar file is a docs directory with two .PDF files that provide the details on making it all work

[Yaboto]

Thanks !