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Hi everyone

We are currently looking at a virtual i/o configuration for a prospect
client. I have gone through the redbook, it advises that HACMP is not
support for virtual ethernet and scsi (boot written in oct 2004) does
anyone know if this is still the case ?

Also

I haven't come across any references for virtualisation for fibre
connected devices to a SAN. Has anyone ?

TIA

Steve

> We are currently looking at a virtual i/o configuration for a prospect
> client. I have gone through the redbook, it advises that HACMP is not
> support for virtual ethernet and scsi (boot written in oct 2004) does
> anyone know if this is still the case ?

I can't say whether it's supported yet or not, but I can say that HACMP
was not in mind when they released the VIO technology (This is what I
was told by both IBM support and IBM instructors I've had).

There are limitations you need to look out for if you are going to set
it up. For one, we absolutely do not use vscsi devices on any systems
other than test because of flakyness we experinced while testing the
technology 7 months ago. The latest patches seemed to address several
problems though. Virtual ethernet setup with failover between two VIO
servers does seem to work reliably, but you don't get bandwidth
agregation in that mode.

> I haven't come across any references for virtualisation for fibre
> connected devices to a SAN. Has anyone ?

We've not had any problems with fibre disks vs. scsi disks under VIO.
It's just the pesky problem of getting your redundancy back once a VIO
server goes down and comes back up (And various other bugs). However,
like I said, the latest patches seems to have helped and there should be
one more major patch set coming out in the fall that should bring the
VIO technology closer to production ready.

-Nathan

speculations from the HACMP v5.3 devgroup has indicated that VIO
support would be included in that version. Will see... it's coming soon.

Hi,

thanks for the responses. I will bear this in mind.

Nathan,

please forgive me, did you say you have fibre hba cards under virtual
I/O ? not just standard scsi

Steven

Yes, we use fibre HBA's for VIO served disk devices. McData switches to
a Shark 800. Actually I don't believe we've ever even tried to use local
scsi disks under VIO. IBM support has never suggested that it wasn't a
supported configuration when I've talked to them about various problems
so I assume it's supported.

-Nathan


etiennebu@hotmail.com wrote:

> Hi,
>
> thanks for the responses. I will bear this in mind.
>
> Nathan,
>
> please forgive me, did you say you have fibre hba cards under virtual
> I/O ? not just standard scsi
>
> Steven