We went through a z10 to z196 with NPIV in place for about 200 Linux
guests across 6 z/VM LPARs. As mentioned, the WWPN Predictor tool and
CCN were a part of the process. If you are carrying forward FC
Express I/O cards, be very careful that they are put into the correct
locations in the new machine. If they are not installed correctly, the
vWWPNs will be wrong. We had this problem and had to scramble during
the swap to fix it. Also, use great Carr in using the WWPN Predictor
tool. Incorrect input will cause incorrect output.
Rick Barlow
Nationwide
On 5/14/12, David Boyes dbo...@sinenomine.net wrote:
1. I think the physical and NPIV wwpns will continue to be managed by
firmware for security. There is definitely value in being able to
migrate
them around a plex though.
This isn't mutually exclusive with telling users don't be stupid -- using
anything other than a NPIV address in a FCP guest will cause you reams of
grief. Don't do it.. You can still manage the hardware addresses in
firmware as today, until you can come up with a way of migrating the mapping
of hw addresses to NPIV or user-managed WWPNs.
2. It isn't very easy to add a channel type. Firmware is free like
device
drivers ;) Anyway, that was a good description of iSCSI. Many things
that I
didn't know.
Since iSCSI semantics are pretty much identical to FCP semantics, I'm not
sure why a new channel type would be required -- in fact, since iSCSI is
just IP packets, you could get rid of one..8-). Perhaps you could ease the
transitions by adding some new options to the FCP channel type -- that
option transport could be covered by the current out-of-band-parameter
communications that are already present in the existing FCP microcode
process.
3. I think this is the most popular solution. I've heard it at least 5
times. It
was my idea when I was a an ignorant new hire. Every time it comes up
there is some reason not to do it. Maybe it is time for customers to
raise
the issue in a more official forum.
Been there, done that. 8-)
It came down to Figure 1: We make a boatload of money licensing FICON and
ECKD tech. Don't mess with that. Figure 2: See Figure 1. IBM owns about 2
dozen different ways to do this (see CKD emulation in the P390 for a
reasonably high-performance example), but see Figure 1. Or the XIV box.
4. We didn't make a ficon data router for various reasons so I don't see
us
revisiting it in this context.
Not sure what a Ficon router does here. A hw assist for 9336 translation
would have to be in the I/O CCW evaluation path to be effective, but that
doesn't imply routing function.
Good point about Tivoli being an added cost, but it shouldn't be an added
cost to just the mainframe. The idea was to have a tool to manage wwpns
across all platforms.
Problem is, most FCP implementations come with one provided by the HW
vendor, and the hw vendors start finger-pointing if you don't use their
tools. If there is a Tivoli requirement to play nice with the mainframe,
that touches a lot more things than just the mainframe, and the assumption
is that all tools have complete control -- and knowledge -- of the entire
universe before they can make smart decisions fails miserably in a
multi-vendor environment -- can't do that if part of the environment is
managed by one tool, and another part is managed by another tool, and there
are no effective APIs to communicate between tools.
There's a lot of cases where the hw vendor tools are included in the price
of the hardware; an additional Tivoli requirement is a non-starter -- unless
you guys are willing to go back to the Avanti consortium work and really
agree on a toolset that HP and Hitachi and Oracle and ALL the other vendors
can use as a common base for management software. That was a promising
project -- killed by vendor bickering.
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