David, Scott, Jim, William,
Thank you for your responses. They are useful.
   
New questions for everyone... How stable (no path prob., drives stay up)
are your tape drives in a SSO environment using emulex (LP9002) HBA's
with StorageTek 9940b drives? 
Is there a better HBA recommendation for 9940b tape drives? Of course, a
the blade server does not apply to these questions.
G.Bruce Chewning

-----Original Message-----
From: veritas-bu-admin AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
[mailto:veritas-bu-admin AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu] On Behalf Of
william.d.brown AT gsk DOT com
Sent: Tuesday, March 22, 2005 5:51 AM
To: veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
Subject: Re: [Veritas-bu] Compaq Blade Servers


We avoid using the same HBA for disk and tape, as the fibre channel
driver 
parameters required are pretty mutually exclusive.   For dual-path disk 
very short timeout and failover is usually configured.  For tape long 
timeout, and extended attempts at recovery.  And yes, we don't use the 
blades as SAN media servers for this very reason, as you cannot fit that

third HBA port.  With servers like the DL380 we have almost no problems.
I 
suggest you read up the Qlogic driver manual and compare with what is
set 
in the registry.   You may be able to achieve some compromise settings
to 
reduce the number of times the tape drops off.  And as someone else
said, 
if you upgrade to 5.1 there may  be some fixes for the problem of
mappings 
changing.

William D L Brown




"Chewning.Bruce" <Bruce.Chewning AT suntrust DOT com> 
Sent by: veritas-bu-admin AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
21-Mar-2005 18:24
 
To
veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
cc

Subject
[Veritas-bu] Compaq Blade Servers






We have been using Compaq Blade servers as Media servers in a SSO 
environment and believe the integrated HBA's (w/ qlogic chip set) may be

the source of our grief (loosing tape drives, then finding them again
with 
a different index/path). The Blade servers are running Win2000 and the 
NetBackup ver is 4.5. Each HBA has it's own zone in the SAN and can not 
see other HBA's and only the tape drives in it's zone. "Persistent 
Binding" is set on all the HBA's using a custom SANserfer utility we
were 
provided by HP that allows us to use persistent binding, but we still
have 
this problem. 
We went to Veritas and HP to ask If they had anyone who is using the 
Compaq Blade servers as Media servers with SAN attached tape drives.
They 
could not find any customers using this configuration. 
My question is... Is anyone out there using Compaq Blade servers as 
NetBackup Media servers or even tested this configuration? G.Bruce
Chewning
 
 
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