Re: Fibre Channel Tape Sharing on Guest Partition

Slightly OT, but I wonder if anyone knows why Fibre Channel support is so difficult to virtualize? Just in general terms. 

Fibre connected SAN storage is a huge benefit to most business configurations. 

Even a tiny system like a DS3500 can support the i - rather the DS3500 supports IBM VIOS 2.1.3 wit h IBM i 6.1 or later. And it can support flash copy and other. (Okay, for comparison, you can can configure 18TB of raw storage (i.e. about 13TB in RAID 5)  for about $16K. That's significant change, but how much would it cost to put that much storage directly on an i? 

Or are there just better solutions than I, being way out of date, am unaware of?  

Anyways, it would seem that fibre connections would be one of the first things virtualized, but it usually seems to be one of the last. Judging by "i" and VMWare. The zSeries machines can all virtualize fibre connections (FICON and FibreChannel) without breaking a sweat, but then, those machines do not have any internal DASD options.  :) 

-Paul 


On Nov 21, 2013, at 11:16 AM, Sue Baker <sue.baker@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Jim Oberholtzer" <midrangel@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote on Wed, 20
Nov 2013 22:08:47 GMT:
I believe it's
supposed to. The tape device and optical in the CEC, show up
no sweat.

Sorry, but virtualized tape device support is limited to SAS or SCSI devices ... no fibre channel attached supported at this time.