SUMMARY: Qlogic HBA failover loses disk

Hello,

Many thanks to those who replied, and apologies for not replying to some
queries. It seems that the SAN we use (from ipstor), requires a piece of
their own software to be used on Solaris in order for failover to work.
(We weren't told this before.) So, as instructed, I have disabled mpxio
and installed their software. It has helped a bit, but we are still
having a problem with the failover. This has been passed to the ipstor
support people. 

Replies were from:
francisco roque
Dean Ross-Smith
Lisa Kachold



Regards,

John.


Original message:

On Fri, 2009-07-17 at 22:36 +0100, John Horne wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> We have two Sun T2000 (SPARC) servers running Solaris 10. Each server
> has two Qlogic 2460 HBAs. Generally they work fine with our SAN.
> However, when the SAN admins cause a failover (the HBA's use
> multipathing), Solaris loses connection with the disks completely and
> pretty much immediately. Trying to access the disks causes 'I/O error'
> errors. We can unmount the disks, but cannot remount them (same error).
> So we have to reboot the server.
> 
> We have looked at the QLA timers and they seem fine. Likewise we have
> looked at Solaris timers such as 'fp_retry_count' and
> 'fp_offline_ticker'. However, the problem is that the connection is lost
> in a very short time - around 5 or 6 seconds. The timers default values
> are all way above this, and so should be fine.
> 
> If I run the Qlogic sansurfer software ('scli') while the disks are
> 'lost', then it detects both HBA's and reports them as being online.
> 
> Anyone any idea as to what is causing the loss of the disks in such a
> short time? It seems to be more a Solaris problem than with the QLA.
> Access to the SAN from Windows servers, with Qlogic HBA's, works fine
> when failing over. However, the timer values are the same as set on the
> Solaris servers.
> 
> 
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> John.
> 
-- 
---------------------------------------------------------------
John Horne, University of Plymouth, UK  Tel: +44 (0)1752 587287
E-mail: John.Horne@plymouth.ac.uk       Fax: +44 (0)1752 587001
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