AIX

Sorry, I have no experience with this storage system.

You said you have no link, but the link between adapter and switch should normally established in case of www-zoning, independent of your storage system.

Can you please repeat the "SAN Zone support" step and verify the link activity (if yellow light start flashing or not) on the failed adapter? In case of no activity, and under assumption you already twist and replace the cable, i guess the adapter is broken.

Yes, no link,connectivity,communication to the fabric switch. SAN guys cannot establish a "link" or "connectivity" from the adapter to the switch.
I will go out tomorrow and do "SAN Zone Support" and re-plug the fibre cable.
I just don't know how the adapter can be broken...it's possible, but improbable that 3 x dual port fibre adapters have 'failed'.
Like I mentioned, upon rmdev the devices and cfgmgr and the adapters coming back fine, don't show me an indication that the adapters could be faulty. I even ran a diag test and no issue. I have no evidence to say its a hardware fault. I just don't know. Last case scenario, try another PCI-x slot and get an IBM engineer to come out and replace the adapter. If the new adapter installs fine, and still same issue, it's definitely the SAN team issue.

Oh on another thought X-ray, what happens if on the switch the port comes up as FE - Fabric Extender? Sometimes the yellow light came on the adapter, but will not display the luns to the VIOS server (secondary server).

Adapters can be broken because of the power-cycling of the host system. In most cases if an adapter is defective it shows once you power-cycle a system. This is a common effect.

Only a few weeks ago we had a power failure in one of our datacenters (lightning struck and UPS failed come up). When we restarted the complete environment an hour later we had several adapters (and in one case even a sysplanar) failing completely or in parts.

In the end we replaced the sysplanar, two power supplies, 2 FC cards and 1 10G-adapter, distributed over ~20 managed systems (mostly 780s and 740s)

Even if they do soft zoning (based on WWNs) there is a chance that you changed to another part of the fabric when you moved the system. In many cases there are several switches ("clusters") and a zone defined on one doesn't necessarily mean it is defined on any other.

In any case i suggest you also check all the connecting cables. There is always the chance of a FC cable broken.

I hope this helps.

bakunin

Sorry no idea

It almost come down to what x-ray and bakunin has said,
To add more,

Are you not seeing the SAN disks on VIO2 itself or on clients coming from VIO2?
If the answer is latter, I had a personal experience with VIO2, wherein the other SysAdmin just added the virtual fibre dynamically and forget to add it in profile. You may want to run a second pair of eyes over there.

If all is set and you can see those are connected and vfchosts defined, then it could be either faulty FC card or zoning issue.

As an sysadmin you can create virtual adapters and establish a connection between VIO and Client (using NPIV), but how the disk is presented to the system is the task of Storage Admin.

Its very simple, after you have provided WWN's of VIO, there is not much you can do (may be except for pulling the fibre cable from Fabric to Server).

Is error log showing any errors for FC card?

Possibility of power cycling the system. Even though this system has been bought brand new less then a year old.

We did change fibre cables as well.

---------- Post updated at 10:01 AM ---------- Previous update was at 09:51 AM ----------

I have VIO2 booting from SAN, so unfortuantely I can not even start the VIO2 unless I see the boot disks, which has come down to, me posting on this forum for help.
As mentioned previously, I'm using vscsi not vfchosts.

You are definitely right, in regards to providing the WWN's and not much I can do, unless the FC is faulty, but without evidence of faulty adapters, I can't move forward and neither can SAN team.

No errors on anything regarding to FC cards.

---------- Post updated at 11:02 AM ---------- Previous update was at 10:01 AM ----------

UPDATE: SAN team have updated me will the following completed on their end

Reseat cable and SFTP on switch and HBA side
Disable and enable ports
Change port speed and disable/enable ports


Xray - you are right, fcstat comes back immediately (I tested on another server.). But that's probably because I have that ports wwn online on the switch. Where this issue, my wwn is not logged online.

...another idea:

While moving the server, have you used protection caps for the fibre cards?
Maybe there are "dust" on the optical connectors and you need to clean (using a cleaning pen) the faulty adapters.


Regards