HP StorageWorks X5500 Network Storage Gateway for Linux setup guide (AP811-96003, October 2009)

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Create LUNs or disk partitions for membership partitions
HP X5500 Storage Gateway for Linux uses a set of membership partitions to control access to the
SAN and to store the device naming database, which includes the global device names that HP
X5500 Storage Gateway for Linux assigns to the SAN disks placed under its control. The membership
partitions must be placed on the SAN, not on local storage.
HP X5500 Storage Gateway for Linux can use either one or three membership partitions. To ensure
that a membership partition is always available, we strongly recommend that you use three membership
partitions.
We recommend that you use your disk array software to create three LUNs for the membership
partitions. Each LUN should be a minimum of 1 GB in size. If you cannot dedicate LUNs to the
membership partitions, instead create a separate partition on three of your shared LUNs and put the
membership partitions on those partitions.
If the LUNs you intend to use for membership partitions are much larger than the recommended 1 GB
and you want to use this remaining space for a filesystem, the data in the filesystem should be static
in nature and lightly accessed. Placing a heavily accessed filesystem on the same LUN with a
membership partition can potentially cause contention issues. It is also recommended that you use
this space only as a basic volume (psd) and never as a component of a dynamic volume (psv).
If you create an extended partition on an MBR disk, you will need to place one or more logical drives
inside of it. An extended partition cannot be used by itself.
NOTE:
It is important to partition the newly created LUNs appropriately, which are represented to the operating
system as sd devices, before HP X5500 Storage Gateway for Linux is configured. (For example, use
fdisk or a similar tool.) If you later need to repartition a disk containing a membership partition,
you will need to unmount any PSFS filesystems on the disk, replace the membership partition, deport
the disk, modify the disk partitions as necessary, reimport the disk, and then reuse the membership
partition.
Configure Fibre Channel switches for the cluster
NOTE:
For all Fibre Channel switches, it is best practice to place each HBA port and its storage ports in a
separate zone. No other initiator HBA port should be present in this zone.
When certain problems occur on a server (for example, hardware problems or the loss of cluster
network communications) and the server ceases to effectively coordinate and communicate with other
servers in the cluster, HP X5500 Storage Gateway for Linux must remove the server’s access to
filesystems to preserve data integrity. This step is called fencing.
When you configure the cluster later in this procedure, you can select the fencing method that you
want to use:
Set up HP X5500 Storage Gateway for Linux solutions20