From: Dirk Kleinhesselink (dkleinh@phy.ucsf.edu)
Date: Sat Mar 31 2007 - 12:27:40 EST
SUMMARY: linux x86 share HSG80 with tru64 alpha
Thanks to: John Lanier, Andrew Tolmie, Bluejay Adametz and Martin
Andersen for their input.
It was certainly possible for me to put my KGPSA-CA fiber channel card
from the retired alphaserver into a Linux opteron system and use
raidsets off the HSG80 controller.
In a nutshell, on the HSG80 I needed to change the OPERATING_SYSTEM type
for the host connection I was changing from TRU64_UNIX to SUN :
SHOW CONN will show the connections,
SET {CONNECTION NAME} OPERATING_SYSTEM=SUN
will change the connection type to SUN
For best practices, one should restrict unit access of the raidsets to
the appropriate hosts. Since I had previously set the unit access of
my raidsets to ALL as I had 2 alphaservers running TRU_CLUSTER, I
should now limit the access -- first halt the alpha server and then
SHOW UNIT will list the units
SHOW {UNIT_ID} will show the information about the unit, including access
SET {UNIT_ID} DISABLE_ACCESS_PATH=ALL
SET {UNIT_ID} ENABLE_ACCESS_PATH=({CONNECTION NAME})
Linux specific issues:
The KGPSA-CA card is manufactured by Emulex corporation and uses linux
driver lpfc, which is in the linux kernel > 2.6.12 (I'm running 2.6.18)
The driver would see the card, but no units were reported. The linux
lpfc driver reports the card as a Light Pulse LP8000. I did some
googling around and found a thread on HP's website from someone trying
to convert an alphaserver connected to an HSG80 through a Fabric
Switch, such as I have, from Tru64 to Debian (alpha) and he had the
same problem I was having and his solution was to upgrade the firmware
on his KGPSA-CA card. I needed to do this as well, which turned out to be
not so trivial, and it solved the problem.
More detailed Firmware update information: Emulex seems to support
Linux reasonably well with comprehensive management tools, BUT these
run on RedHat Enterprise and SuSE Enterprise distributions *ONLY*. As
I do not use either of these, it was a no-go for me to get the lputil
tool, which is the linux application that can do firmware updates (I
tried to use Fedora Core but there is a driver piece now being
included in RedHat Enterprise 5 that does not seem to be in Fedora
Core 6). I next tried HP's website and one can find firmware updates
for the 64bit PCI fiber channel card for Tru64 or DOS based - I
downloaded dos based package, containing the LP6DUTIL for firmware
updates and I created a FreeDOS bootable CD including the utility and
firmware, but the utility would seem to output an out of memory
message (OOM) and crash. Emulex had firmware updates in their
legacy support area for the LP8000 card and they had 2 sets of firmware
updates, depending on the "Dragonfly" chip version the card contains
and instructions for how to determine what chip the card had.
Of the 2 firmware packages, one seemed to be nearly identical (Dragonfly
chip version 2) to the package from HP with the same LP6DUTIL that would
not work, whereas the other package had a different version of the
LP6DUTIL and this one seemed to work, although the menus were a little
different than described in the documentation. I could verify
with the LP6DUTIL tool from Emulex's Dragonfly Chip version 1
firmware package that my KGPSA-CA card has the version 2 chip
and I could also use this tool to program the card with the
version 2 firmware.
Connecting to the SAN switch and issuing the nsShow command was also
informative - with the original firmware, when the linux driver was
loaded, I would only see basic wwid information from the linux connection,
whereas the alphaserver connection would also report firmware level
and driver information from the tru64 driver (emx0). After
firmware upgrade when the linux driver was loaded, the linux connection
reported more information, including driver information.
Original Question:
This may be a little bit off-topic, but some of you may have experience
with this: I have/had a 2 member Tru64 cluster connected to a HSG80
raid controller. I set this up more than 5 years ago. We're retiring
the alpha servers and one of them had a hardware problem and has been
shutdown. I'm replacing the alpha servers with a couple of opteron
servers running linux. I took the fiber channel card out of the
retired alphaserver and stuck it in one of the opteron servers and
it is recognized as an Emulex LP8000. The other alpha server is still
running and accessing the HSG80. What I'm wondering is if I could
easily unmount from the running alphaserver a no-longer used hsg80 raidset
(with other hsg80 raidsets still used) and connect the linux opteron
server to the hsg80 and reformat the raidset and access it on linux ?
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