We have been using alternate pathing from the "getgo" on fabric Magstar drives (2 months). What you do is connect up the secondary port of the drive and do a cfgmgr to get them defined. The drives will show up twice then with two different RMT definitions. Issuing the proper AIX commands you can see this (my AIX admin does this for me and I was just not watching that closely). The next step is simple following the directions in the Magstar IUG and run the instAtape -a command to build the alternate path tree. What happens is an additional indicator is added to the address definitions xx-xx-xx will now be xx-xx-xx-PRI and xx-xx-xx-ALT depending on the occurence. The second occurrence of a drive is duped as ALT and the first is the PRI. In TSM you just use either RMT definition.
We just installed the 7.0.3.0 today. I heard about this load balancing stuff but did not know it was going to be in this driver version. Before the IOs all went down the primary RMT so long as it was available regardless of the RMT specified. If load balancing really was implemented it will really simplify my life. We use 2 ES-1000s per 6 drives and connect each drive to both, half with port 0 in one switch and half in the other and the port 1 on the other. The issue always was that we had to be extremely careful to make sure that the primary paths were split. I hope that 7.0.3.0 does what I think it does. One thing I can tell you is the fibre Magstar is a screamer. -----Original Message----- From: Orville L. Lantto [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Thursday, December 06, 2001 3:42 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Alternate Pathing Support for AIX 4.3.3 Get Atape 7.0.3.0, it has Alternate Pathing AND Load Balancing. The README has the details. Sorry, I haven't tried it yet Dan Lee <Dan.Lee@MUTUALOF To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] OMAHA.COM> cc: Sent by: "ADSM: Subject: Alternate Pathing Support for for AIX 4.3.3 Dist Stor Manager" <[EMAIL PROTECTED] .EDU> 12/06/01 02:23 PM Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" We have TSM 4.2.1.7 on AIX 4.3.3 We have 3590 drives and we are looking at utilizing the alternate pathing support and has anyone done this? How is it configured and has it ever been tested? Dan Lee
