Re: VIOS DS4700 and a E4A -- MIDRANGE-L

William.Epperson@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:

I'm trying to get in an E4A myself and from what I understand and have read about the E4A, you can give the i server it's own physical hardware. The
problem is connecting to external storage such as DS4*00 arrays. For the tape backup you should be able to share a fibre network and create a
physical connection to your i because you can actually have a physical fibre port connected to a tape drive/library. The notes I read said, "...never
share a fibre card/port for SAN and Tape..." That may be why there were problems with the blade fibre tape support, but it seems that your storage is
the main problem. You can't connect to "normal" SAN's from an i due to the i's 520 byte block??? versus a normal 512 byte block. So you virtualize
this storage through VIOS. I believe you'd need to present a hosted disk from the VIO Server and present it to the i from VIOS, how that's done I'm
not quite sure yet. Other than that I think you should be fine for creating the rest of your connections as physical devices versus virtual, I prefer
physical devices personally. But then again, it all depends on how you're trying to skin that cat. Virtual connections make things easier to move
servers. You should be able to pick up a physical network port through the Integrated Host Ethernet Adapter (IHEA), I believe. I'm pulling this from
memory so please understand if something is "off".

Good luck,
Bill Epperson Jr.
Systems Communications Analyst
Memorial Health System
(719) 365-8831

Kirk Goins <kgoins@xxxxxxxxxxx> Sent by: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx To Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx> cc 07/01/2009 11:39 Subject Re: VIOS DS4700 and a E4A Please respond to Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>

Pete Helgren wrote:

Kirk,

I can't weigh in on the DS4700 issue, but the latest release of VIOS in
combination with the latest firmware and CUME *has* been rock solid on
my JS12 blade. It was all bubblegum and bailing wire for a while but
IBM got it resolved in the latest release. I wouldn't hesitate to run i
on a Power 6+ blade from here on out.

Pete

Kirk Goins wrote:

Anyone running a DS4700 as the disk on an E4A? My understanding is I
would need to run VIOS as the base OS and guest 6.1 on top. On blades
this hasn't been the most stable. If you are running a DS4700, what
are you doing for backups?

Thanks

Thanks Pete,

Are you privy to any info on if and when we will have native/direct
access to tape from the Power6 Blades?

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William
I can go native SAN if you will, but then I need a DS6800 or DS8000 and for this setup that's way over kill. to use the DS4700 and I think DS4800 I have to use VIOS and VIOS will OWN all the needed resources, if I under correctly. I've setup several E4A's with standard LPARs running V5R4 and V6R1. No Hosted setups yet. Moving tape and other resources between LPARs with the HMC I don't think you can mix and match VIOS available resources and those that VIOS does know about, I could wrong though...