Robert LeBlanc wrote: > What do you mean by split-up? Debian has multi-path and also the new > RDMA (?) that has improved performance on our SAN by a great deal. > > Robert > > On Thu, Jun 4, 2009 at 9:34 PM, Daniel Fussell <[email protected] > <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote: > > Does anyone know how or tried to split up a Fiber Channel HBA with > NPIV > in Debian? I know it can be done in SuSE and maybe Solaris and > Red Hat, > but I'm not seeing anything for Debian. Supposedly drivers were > included for it in the 2.6.23 upstream kernel, but I can't find any > utilities or configs for it. > My purpose is to assign several NPIV virtual HBA ports to various Xen virtual machines. Then I can use LUN masking on the storage array to limit visibility to just the DomU, where LVM and/or DM can manage them as needed. I could do the same thing using PCI-passthrough, but I don't have enough HBAs nor enough switch ports.
Right now I have the LUNs masked to the physical HBA in the host OS, and the logical volumes assigned to the guests from there. The up side and down side is the host and the guest can both mount the filesystem in the logical volume...at the same time. Not an issue if you use a clustered filesystem, but instantly corrupts other filesystems. Normally I'd say it's not an issue for a seasoned sysop; then I watched a seasoned sysop forget to shutdown a guest before expanding the filesystem on the host; there were bytes splattered all over after that... Hence the search for NPIV configuration info, or some other multi-mount prevention method. All I've found so far have been Emulex and Qlogic marketing docs, both claiming to be the first to develop NPIV. Grazie, ;-Daniel Fussell -------------------- BYU Unix Users Group http://uug.byu.edu/ The opinions expressed in this message are the responsibility of their author. They are not endorsed by BYU, the BYU CS Department or BYU-UUG. ___________________________________________________________________ List Info (unsubscribe here): http://uug.byu.edu/mailman/listinfo/uug-list
