SUMMARY: Multi-hosting an A-3000

From: RHoehnke@talisman-energy.com
Date: Thu Sep 10 1998 - 09:06:04 CDT


Thanks for the replys Brian Herzog, Allen Todd and James D. LaPlaine.

To clarify upon the original posting, I was looking for simple
multi-hosting. In my situation there is no need for a multi-initiator /
disk sharing environment.

The responses .....

>From Brian Herzog and Allen Todd ....
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Lets be careful with terminology and assumptions here.

If we are talking about having two hosts with access to the same disks,
that is not just multi-hosting; more importantly, it is
multi-initiating.

The original poster didn't say anything about needing a multi-initiated
environment, or anything about having the two hosts have access to each
other's disks.

The original poster only mentioned wanting to be able to have two hosts
share an A3000. In this scenario, each host gets exclusive use of one
of the A3000 controllers, along with any disks assigned to that
controller. No multi-initiation is required, and no nvramrc changes are
required. The tradeoff, as I mentioned in my original response, is that
controller failover is not supported in this scenario.)

If the original poster did intend to describe a multi-initiated
environment, then I strongly recommend he consider a SunCluster rather
than a home-grown configuration. I wish I had a share of Sun stock for
every home-grown HA environement that didn't work when it was needed
most - at the time of a failure.

-Brian

> From: todd@susq.com (Allen Todd)
> Subject: Re: Multi-hosting an A-3000
> To: RHoehnke@talisman-energy.com
> Date: Wed, 9 Sep 1998 16:09:53 -0400 (EDT)
> Cc: ssa-managers@eng.auburn.edu
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>
> Yes you can -- but you need to make a few changes to the nvramrc
> to support a dual scsi initiator setup. This is necessary for the
> Sun Cluster (old HA) configuration.
>
> Ours has something like this...
>
> # eeprom nvramrc
> nvramrc=devalias disk1 /sbus@7,0/SUNW,fas@3,8800000/sd@d,0
> devalias disk /sbus@7,0/SUNW,fas@3,8800000/sd@c,0
> probe-all
> cd /sbus@7,0/SUNW,fas@3,8800000
> 7 encode-int " scsi-initiator-id" property
> cd /sbus@3,0/SUNW,fas@3,8800000
> 7 encode-int " scsi-initiator-id" property
> device-end
> install-console
> banner
>
>
> Allen
>
>

>From James D. LaPlaine
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Yes this option does indeed exist and is supported by Sun.
Just remember that you will only be able to see the LUNS on a controller
if
that host is connected to that controller. There is no fail-over in this
mode.

James LaPlaine
Systems Engineer
Strategic Technologies, Inc.

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Original posting

Greetings admin folk .....

Is anyone out there multi-hosting a Sun A-3000 disk array ?. I know this
product is designed to be connected to a single server with multiple I/O
paths but I'm curious as to whether or not the option exists. I'm
looking at connecting 2 Ultra-2's running Solaris 2.5.1 to an A-3000.

Will summarize

TIA ...... Rick

********************
Rick Hoehnke
Minerva Technology
rhoehnke@talisman-energy.com
RickHoehnke@minerva.ca
Phone: 403-237-1610
Fax: 403-237-1674
********************



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