Another Solaris and Netapp FC SAN puzzler...

We have two Solaris 8 hosts connected to a FAS960c pair via two FC SAN switches. These hosts do not have Veritas VxVM installed. Instead we are doing multipathing with the Solaris scsi_vhci driver.

The filers are running 7.0.1R1 with "cfmode partner". They occasionally whine because the Suns are using the secondary paths to some of the LUNs, i.e., through the partner filer's 7b or 9b ports.

I ran this command on the Sun boxes, which shows the available paths to a LUN:

luxadm display -p port-wwn-of-filer

For example,

luxadm display -p 500a098186c7ad4d

This shows 4 paths to the LUN, which is correct, but they are all "primary":

DEVICE PROPERTIES for disk: 500a098186c7ad4d Status(Port A): O.K. Status(Port B): O.K. Vendor: NETAPP Product ID: LUN WWN(Node): 500a098086c7ad4d WWN(Port A): 500a098386c7ad4d WWN(Port B): 500a098c86c7ad4d Revision: 0.2 Serial Num: C4a9a3zV1-yc Unformatted capacity: 102400.000 MBytes Read Cache: Enabled Minimum prefetch: 0x0 Maximum prefetch: 0x0 Device Type: Disk device Path(s): /dev/rdsk/c4t60A980004334613961337A56312D7963d0s2 /devices/scsi_vhci/ssd@g60a980004334613961337a56312d7963:c,raw Controller /devices/pci@1e,600000/SUNW,qlc@2/fp@0,0 Device Address 500a098386c7ad4d,0 Host controller port WWN 210000e08b1ee380 Class primary State ONLINE Controller /devices/pci@1e,600000/SUNW,qlc@2/fp@0,0 Device Address 500a098c86c7ad4d,0 Host controller port WWN 210000e08b1ee380 Class primary State ONLINE Controller /devices/pci@1e,600000/SUNW,qlc@2,1/fp@0,0 Device Address 500a098186c7ad4d,0 Host controller port WWN 210100e08b3ee380 Class primary State ONLINE Controller /devices/pci@1e,600000/SUNW,qlc@2,1/fp@0,0 Device Address 500a098a86c7ad4d,0 Host controller port WWN 210100e08b3ee380 Class primary State ONLINE

In the above output, the paths involving

500a098a86c7ad4d 500a098c86c7ad4d ^^ ^^

correspond to the partner filer's 9b and 7b ports and yet they have Class primary, so it is no wonder that the Suns use these paths sometimes.

Here are the four paths in a more comprehensible form:

host port A --> FC switch 1 --> local filer port 7a host port A --> FC switch 1 --> partner filer port 7b

host port B --> FC switch 2 --> local filer port 9a host port B --> FC switch 2 --> partner filer port 9b

I have checked the igroups and LUN mappings and cfmode and cabling, etc., and all are correct. The paths are all there and they are all correct. The only problem that I see is that they are all "primary". For what it is worth, we have some Suns on the SAN that are using Veritas multipathing and Veritas can tell the difference between a primary and secondary path.

Does anyone have any suggestions for fixing this?

This problem isn't a show stopper, just more of an annoyance because occasionally the filer sends autosupport to netapp about it.

Steve Losen scl@virginia.edu phone: 434-924-0640

University of Virginia ITC Unix Support