Re: Fibre Channel Tape Sharing on Guest Partition

If you have VIOS in the mix you can virtualize like crazy. Both tap and disk. I just finished a major install with Pete that's all Fiber Channel storage through SAN Switches and VIO to V3700. Once a few bits are set up in VIOS you simply create storage on the SAN and attach it to whichever partition that needs it. Shazam more disk. Tape is the same.

Since VIOS is needed for other advanced functions as well such as mobility, memory sharing and more, it makes sense that VIOS would bring all that support first.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com
www.iInTheCloud.com

On 11/21/2013 12:29 PM, Paul Raulerson wrote:

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Or are there just better solutions than I, being way out of date, am unaware of?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