AIX

All "Other iscsi ..." means is that there are no ematching entries for these disks in the predefined database.
You can still ask Dell about ODM entries for AIX, or art least recommendations on max transfer size/count, qdepth, etc..

What is the Discovery Policy from "smit iscsi" F3 for these?

The two Dell tech's I've talked to are pretty clueless when it comes to AIX, they have linked me articles regarding configuring the iSCSI adapters in general like assigning IP addresses. There is a Dell article from 2009 that talks about the qdepth, but doesn't really help me for load balancing of failover.

My two iSCSI adapters if ics0 and ics1 are both set to file and I have edited the /etc/iscsi/targetshw0 and targetshw1 to connect to both volumes. According to the Dell article you linked before for Equal Logic configuration, MPIO is not supported and I should just use one card for each volume which does not give me any fail over or load balancing on the AIX server.

---------- Post updated at 02:45 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:43 PM ----------

Also to add, I have spent hours today googling for someone else who has posted on EqualLogic and odm and have not found really anyone. I know that the EMC SAN's do have an odm and have seen that talked about multiple times.

I really do not want to use a different program to do MPIO because there will also be an attached SCSI SAN that will hold two other volumes the AIX server will access as well and it is currently using MPIO for that and I do not want to make any changes to it.

What's left, new NICs or ???

I guess you change it to ODM if you had ODM. Is /etc/iscsi/targets something you (can) hand build?

Partition the system and have one side process with each path?

Seems like brand name favoritism or lack of funding at Dell. That's an old, old story.

It hardly makes sense to install extra sw like Veritas just to do load balance and failover, but I think it could.

Can I ask a general question and maybe someone can chime in just to clarify?


We were sold two HBA iSCSI TOE PCI-X cards and both cards were installed with the idea that we would have load balancing and failover connected to the Dell EqualLogic.

Because of the type of cards I assume that I should be configuring the ics0 and ics1 interfaces, can someone just confirm that for me? Because there's also the iscsi0 showing up and my understanding that is a software initator that I would use if I didn't have these HBA cards.

The reason I ask is I am reviewing the only Dell document I could find regarding this and it talkes about Etherchannel and using interfaces called ent0 and ent1, which shows up in my system, but I can't assign IP addresses to those interfaces. Only to my main interface en0 and I do not want that to change since my iSCSI network is separate.

When I do a
lsdev -Cs pci I do see the ics0 and ics1 iSCSI Adapters show in the list. I also see the ent0 and ent1 and they are PCI-X adapters and that kind of confuses me.

To be honest i don't know your cards and will probably not be of much help to you. Just a few things here i can clear up:

"Etherchannel" is IBMs name for bundling several IP interfaces together to one. You can do that either for failover purposes or for load balancing. The process is: you first create the physical interfaces (entX, entX+1, ...), don't give them any IP address or configure them otherwise, then create an "Etherchannel" device from them. You probably want to follow the SMIT panels for this, they are pretty self-explanatory.

Issue a

Code:

lsdev -Cc adapters

which should show you your cards as well as by which device name they go by.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Thanks that does help. I guess what still confuses me is I don't know if I can configure Etherchannel or not with the iSCSI cards. When I show the adapters I do have ent0 and ent1 and then ics0 and ics1. Is it possible that ent0 and ent1 are part of the iSCSI cards? They are listed as "10/100/1000 Base-TX PCI-X Adapter" and I don't have any additional ethernet ports beyond the integrated ports and the iSCSI ports that I added.