ADSM-L

Re: Alternate Pathing Support for AIX 4.3.3

2001-12-06 21:21:47
Subject: Re: Alternate Pathing Support for AIX 4.3.3
From: "Seay, Paul" <seay_pd AT NAPTHEON DOT COM>
Date: Thu, 6 Dec 2001 21:18:00 -0500
We have been using alternate pathing from the "getgo" on fabric Magstar
drives (2 months).  What you do is connect up the secondary port of the
drive and do a cfgmgr to get them defined.  The drives will show up twice
then with two different RMT definitions.  Issuing the proper AIX commands
you can see this (my AIX admin does this for me and I was just not watching
that closely).  The next step is simple following the directions in the
Magstar IUG and run the instAtape -a command to build the alternate path
tree.  What happens is an additional indicator is added to the address
definitions xx-xx-xx will now be xx-xx-xx-PRI and xx-xx-xx-ALT depending on
the occurence.  The second occurrence of a drive is duped as ALT and the
first is the PRI.  In TSM you just use either RMT definition.

We just installed the 7.0.3.0 today.  I heard about this load balancing
stuff but did not know it was going to be in this driver version.  Before
the IOs all went down the primary RMT so long as it was available regardless
of the RMT specified.  If load balancing really was implemented it will
really simplify my life.  We use 2 ES-1000s per 6 drives and connect each
drive to both, half with port 0 in one switch and half in the other and the
port 1 on the other.  The issue always was that we had to be extremely
careful to make sure that the primary paths were split.  I hope that 7.0.3.0
does what I think it does.

One thing I can tell you is the fibre Magstar is a screamer.

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