AIX

Hi,

I was trying to uninstall the native MPIO driver on the AIX 6.1 machine we have in our lab and ran into a whole bunch dependent filesets initially. I deleted the disks, fcsX, fscsiX, fcnetX and tried again, but ran into the same error.

Subsequently, I figured out that the OS disks in this machine were also being managed by MPIO. SO, how do i remove the fileset?

Any help is appreciated.

Why do you want to deinstall it at all - if it is because you want to use something like powerpath or EMC MPIO instead, you don't have to deinstall the native MPIO - you only need to drop disks, adapters and so on , than install the powerpath software and reboot the system - when it comes up, it will use powerpath instead of MPIO.

Hope this helps
zxmaus

With powerpath you don't need to drop the disks - just varyoffvg each volume group and reboot. A utility is provided to put the rootvg under powerpath as well.

As long as 1 disk is running under MPIO you won't be able to uninstall the device driver - however this isn't recommended practice for AIX, as best practice is to have all your device drivers loaded in case you have to restore after a disaster.

Would you mind telling us why you want to uninstall MPIO?

Sure.

I work in a storage lab and have been doing some tests on the firmware running on the DS series of arrays with different operating systems and AIX happened to be one of them. I have to confirm a behavior as part of my use case and the test goes something like this -

Configure MPIO to manage the luns.
Verify the luns are presented appropriately on the paths coming from the array.
Take the failover driver out of service.
Perform a bus scan and verify that all the luns are presented on both the paths coming from the array.

I did not realize that MPIO was managing the internal SAS HDDs as well. I guess it is impossible to remove MPIO if it manages even one device.


Any thoughts on how this can be done?

"Take the failover driver out of service."

What sort of test is that, when it is part of the operating system?

You may as well issue the shutdown command and then just be satisfied that it will not work if the operating system is down!