VERITAS Volume Manager 3.5 Hardware Notes (September 2004)

Hardware Notes

Hardware Requirements

Chapter 1

NOTE In order to conﬁgure DMP with active/active peripherals, you must have B9116AA,

the VERITAS Volume Manager 3.5 for HP-UX, installed. Without B9116AA, you

cannot set up DMP and can only conﬁgure a single path from the host to an

active/active peripheral. Active/active peripherals cannot be conﬁgured as

active/passive.

DMP and HP Surestore Disk Arrays xp256, xp512, and xp48

HP Surestore Disk Arrays xp256, xp512, and xp48 are supported with Dynamic

Multipathing (DMP) in active/active mode. If VxVM encounters devices with identical

VxVM Disk IDs, the VxVM software will give a preference to selecting the P-Vol as

opposed to the S-Vol to resolve the conﬂict. This disk selection policy will work only for

the following microcode revisions:

• xp256 microcode revisions 5244 and above

DMP and EMC Symmetrix Disk Array Support

The Dynamic Multipathing feature (DMP) of the Volume Manager works with the EMC

Symmetrix disk array only if the disk array is conﬁgured in the Common Serial Number

Mode. This is because only the Common Serial Number Mode conﬁguration provides

unique device identiﬁcation on different paths for DMP to conﬁgure its database.

Without this mode, DMP cannot provide the multipathing functionality. DMP cannot

access EMC Symmetrix disks as individual disks with a single path it found by scanning

the device information tree in the kernel.

For the DMP functionality to work with the EMC Symmetrix disk array, the following

conditions must be met:

• EMC Symmetrix users must program their disk arrays in the Common Serial

Number Mode before installing the Volume Manager package.

• The minimum level of microcode on the EMC Symmetrix should be:

— 5265 or 5266 for Sym-4 on models 3330, 3430, and 3700

— 5265 or 5266 for Sym-4.8 on models 3630, 3830, and 3930

— 5566 for Sym-5 on models 8130, 8430, and 8730

• The Common Serial Number Mode should be enabled for all channels that

participate in the DMP. This is done at installation time in the Symmetrix

conﬁguration by the EMC Customer Engineer.

• Ultra SCSI and fast-wide differential (FWD) SCSI support has been tested on the

EMC OSD (Open System Director) controller.

See your sales representative for further updates on hardware support.

DMP and HP FC10 Disk System Support

Because of the way LUNs are distributed across controllers by HP-UX, the

enable/disable controller feature of VxVM does not function as expected for the following

conﬁgurations of FC10 disk systems:

• multiple daisy chained FC10 disk systems connected to a single host

• multiple FC10 disk systems connected to a single host through a hub