[TriLUG] installing and booting from fibre

[Matt Dinsmore]

We are doing RHEL4 over SAN here. We have seen the "Phatom Drives" as 
well. But we only see 1... so we allocate 1 LUN of 72GB, then boot into 
RHEL4, and we get both sda and sdb. The sdb drive is 19MB and every time 
we try to touch it, we get errors. Our SAN solution is a DS4500. As long 
as we don't touch sdb everything is fine, except for the usual boot 
probe throwing a couple errors.

Have you tried using the qlogic drivers? or are you just using drivers 
provided with RHEL4? We're using emulex hardware, so we installed their 
drivers and tools and it seems to be ok as long as we leave sdb alone. 
With the emulex drivers, it automagically does multipathing, we tested 
this the other day, so I know RHEL4 is capable of it.

Matt Dinsmore
matt at centrix.net

Andrew Ball wrote:
> Has anyone had any success installing SLES or RHEL (or any Linux with
> a 2.6 kernel) to a fibre logical volume?
>
> I've been trying the following setup with RHEL 4 and SLES 10 betas
> without any luck:
>
> (1) IBM FAStT 700 fibre storage array controller + 1 expansion cabinet
> (2) One logical volume on the storage array set up with RAID 5
> (3) An IBM HS20 8843 blade with a qlogic ql2312 HBA.  This is a 2Gbps
> dual-port HBA.  I can get RHEL 4 to install with all sorts of I/O
> errors if I only map one of the ports to the logical volume.
>
> I see all sorts of strange behavior when I disable the planar SCSI
> adapter on the blade and try to deploy RHEL or SLES to the logical
> volume.  First off, I see IO errors for sdb,sdc,sdd, and sde [if I
> only map the first port on the HBA, otherwise I see even more].
>
> Does anyone know why I would see these errors?  Does it have something
> to do with the RAID-5 slice of the array's being made up of 5 drives?
> I thought hardware RAID was supposed to abstract the array, so that I
> would only see sda, not sd{a,b,c,d,e}.
>
> Another thing that someone suggested was to configure multipathing.
> I tried the qlremote utility on RHEL 4, but it died and complained
> that it couldn't find any support HBA's with an odd out of memory
> error.
>
> Any help just understanding what I'm dealing with would be much 
> appreciated.
>
> Thanks!
> Andrew