Solaris

Hi,
I believe these boxes to be V880’s, but they’re in a data centre 200 miles away! They’re also Live production boxes running a rather important Oracle 10g cluster, so as you can probably understand, I’m a little hesitant to do anything too drastic which may break what’s currently working.
Primarily I’m a Linux admin, whose been drafted in to help out with this migration…as seemingly there’s no one else in the company with any kind of unix skills!
I’ll endeavour to get the kernel patch cluster to the latest….please can you try to give some confidence that in doing so won’t break what’s already working!?

Many thanks for your time it is very much appreciated!

Rich

a serious opinon:
please go and get professional help! this is not a thing that should be done remote via guesses... your installation is realy old (the first solaris 10 release!) and it looks like there hasn't been much update/patch work.

good luck!
DN2

Is mpathadm installed on the server? If so, start using that to see what your system sees on the storage.

I suspect you're using Solaris native multipathing, and there's a chance your version doesn't recognize your new storage.

DN2,

I think you're right! In theory, all I should have needed to do was:
(I'd be grateful if you could sanity check my logic)

1. run "cfgadm -c configure c2" and "cfgadm -c configure c2"
2. add - name="fp" parent="/pci@9,600000/SUNqlc@1" port=0 mpxio-disable="no";
and name="fp" parent="/pci@9,600000/SUNqlc@2" port=0 mpxio-disable="no"; to /kernel/drv/fp.conf
3. reboot -- -r
4. use format to partition and freehog the disks
5. Create the character devices for Oracle.

I'm feeling way out of my comfort zone at the moment and am thinking I should tell the managment to bring in a Solaris consultant.
If it only it was Red Hat... I wouldn't be here ;-)

Cheers
Rich

---------- Post updated at 02:56 PM ---------- Previous update was at 02:54 PM ----------

achenle,

mpathadm isn't installed, I was intending to use native mpxio

Thanks

Rich

mpathadm is in a later solaris release...

I mentioned mpathadm because I suspect native mpxio isn't recognizing the EMC array as multipath-capable:

Code:

# mpathadm show mpath-support libmpscsi_vhci.so

The mpathadm utility is used to view and administer mpxio. The man page for the latest version is here:

3.Administering Multipathing Devices Through mpathadm Commands (Solaris Express SAN Configuration and Multipathing Guide) - Sun Microsystems

Solaris native mpxio relies on the vendor and product strings returned from the disk array to work, and it's possible to add entries to the scsi_vhci.conf file to handle additional array types that do not have built-in support. That capability has evolved significantly over the lifetime of mpxio, though, and I'd bet it's rudimentary at best in the initial releases of mpxio and Solaris 10, if it exists at all.

Of course, if you start making modifications to scsi-vhci.conf and adding new arrays for mpxio to use, you're probably well outside the bounds of supported activity.

You should check if later versions of Solaris 10 support the array in question, though. Then you're just an upgrade away from support.