SSA Cabling Question 1

[Mag0007]

Anyone have a SSA cabling diagram for 1 HBA and 2 SSA 7133 drawers?

 

[Breslau]

if you want the hba to see all drives in both drawers:

run HBA-A1 to port 1 of the first drawer
run HBA-A2 to port 16 of the first drawer
run HBA-B1 to port 1 of the second drawer
run HBA-B2 to port 16 of the second drawer

if you want them to appear to be on the same loop, bridge the two drawers together with a cable from drawer one, port 16 to drawer 2 port 1. you'd then just connect A1 to port 1 of drawer one, and then A2 to port 16 of drawer two.

hope that answers your question

 

[Mag0007]

WOW!

Very good post!

After I setup everything, I just run cfgmgr -v, and start creating my VGs right?

Got the info for 2 Servers and 2 Drawers?

 

[Breslau]

Typically with SSA you'll need to decide if you want JBODs, or some level of RAID that your card supports, or a combination of the two. you can go through smit (smitty dev), and head to the section you should have for SSA and define what your disks should be. if you just run cfgmgr now w/o doing this part, then you'll just end up with whatever existed on these drives before.. assuming someone has used them previously.

 

[Mag0007]

Breslau:

Good Post!

I am planning to get a newwer SSA card that will support 64bit. Is it worth going for SSA these days? I have a 7133 drawers. Or, are there other options?

 

[Breslau]

If you can get what you need out of it, then sure. We've been going with networked storage here for the past few years, so i can't make comments on the latest SSA offerings. I will say though, that out of the 8 full drawers of SSA we've had for the last 7 years i've seen maybe 3 or 4 drives fail.

 

[Mag0007]

Got a recommendation on a SSA card for 7133 drawers? Its needs be to 64 bit compatable....

 

[Breslau]

what model of server is getting the SSA card?

also, found this:

Effective June 3, 2005, IBM will withdraw from marketing the following products. On or after the effective date of withdrawal, you can no longer order these products directly from IBM.

* IBM Serial Disk System (machine type 7133, models D40 and T40, and selected features)

 

[Mag0007]

haha!
Its a F-80 server

So my 7133 system will be discontinued?

 

[Breslau]

Well you just won't be able to buy any new ones. i imagine ibm will continue to support the hardware should you have failures.

for the card, there's the FC 6225 type 4-P, and the 6230. the 6230 has a 128MB cache option. i don't know if either of these are 64 bit

 

[Mag0007]

Hmm

Trying to cerate a VG (using hdisk2)

I am getting this error message

516-1398 mkvg: The physical volume hdisk2, appears to belong to
another volume group. Use the force option to add this physical volume
to a volume group.
0516-862 mkvg: Unable to create volume group.

Any clue why I am getting this?


$ lspv hdisk2
0516-320 : Physical volume hdisk2 is not assigned to
a volume group.

 

[hirschaj]

Are any other servers cabled to the same SSA array? If so one of those servers may already have that disk assigned to a VG.


Jim Hirschauer

http://www.aixexpert.com

 

[Mag0007]

nope just this server.

if I do a force mkvg it works

i guess thats good....

 

[DukeSSD]

IBM storage devision have decided that the SSA products are no longer going to be developed or marketed.
This means there will be no new SSA products and further development of device drivers and firmware, etc. will be limited to problem fixes only.
SSA is dead.
Existing SSA equipment will be supported for a couple of years and components, disks, etc. will be available for purchase for a short time only.
Do not base any new solutions or projucet on the SSA architecture.