Multipath

Okay, so we received a brand new x3650 the other day entitled to replace one (or better two) of our NAS frontend servers. We installed Windows on it the other day (had to create a custom Windows Server 2003 CD first, since the default one doesn’t recognize the integrated ServeRAID), and we prepped the box during the week with the usual things. On Monday I started installing the " IBM StorageManager RDAC" MultiPath driver (since the box got two single port PCIe FC-HBA’s) and figured I’d be nice if we had this. I asked a IBM Systems Engineer of one of our partners, which told me generally there wouldn’t be a problem with Microsoft Cluster Services (MSCS) and the IBM MPIO driver. Only requirement would be that I’d install the new storport.sys driver (version 5.2.3790.4021) first (as in Microsoft KB932755). ...

As the title pretty much tells, I’ve been working on fixing the Root-Disk-Multipathing feature of our XenServer installations. Our XenServer boot from a HA-enabled NetApp controller, however we recently noticed that during a controller fail-over some, if not all, paths would go offline and never come back. If you do a cf takeover and cf giveback in short succession, you’ll end up with a XenServer host that is unusable, as the Root-Disk would be pretty much non-responsive. ...

Well, after I scripted the installation the other day, I tried installing SLES11.1-Updates to the freshly installed systems. Guess what ? The thing broke. Initially (it was late Friday afternoon - like 6 PM - before my one week vacation) I didn’t have much time to debug the issue, so I sat down last week and looked at the issue. During the installation, when first starting multipath via command line, the scsi-mpatha device appears, and each and every occurance of this is subsequentially being used (and other stuff replaced by this actually) during the whole installation phase. ...