Re: [SAGE] Experience with Emulex HBA software

[Doug Hughes <doug@eng.auburn.edu>]

On Fri, 23 Jan 2004, Adam and Christine Levin wrote:

>
> Well, apparently, the point is moot.  It turns out the Emulex stuff is
> more of an API than actual software, and is used by partners (ie disk
> vendors) to incorporate the failover technology into their own products.
>
> Does Sun have multipathing HBA failover software, or are we "stuck" with
> the Veritas product?  I assume that with Veritas, we must use Volume
> Manager to get the DPM functionality?
>
> If anyone has any other suggestions for HBA failover software, I'd be glad
> to hear it.

sun has MPxIO. I haven't actually used it, but it's supposed to provide
failover. It's rather new. I don't know if a lot of people are using
this yet.
You might look into it.

(ps - DMP = dynamic multipathing vs DPM. Yes, you need volume manager
for that. If you plan to mount the same volume in multiple places you
need cluster volume manager (and perhaps cluster filesystem))

The old old way on Sun was AlternatePathing (AP). It was interesting in
that you could alternate path practically *anything*. Disks, network
interfaces, etc. Started as E10k specific and then became available
on other Enterprise servers, but I don't think it really ever caught on.
It was a bit complex to configure and required yet another special
region on the disk (like a disksuite metadb)

	Doug