Re: Connectin HPE 3PAR to Power 9 and able to IPL from it?

I would echo this but add that should you decide to IPL from internal disk the suggested 'ready made DR plan' is out the window. This is because you wouldn't have those disks replicated and since IBM i is a single level store you miss one byte you miss 'em all.

As noted vSCSI isn't best practice as it requires additional steps to configure on VIOS and causes some extra work to be done by the VIOS servers. Effectively this is two step writes - one from IBM i to VIOS and one from VIOS to the SAN, but it all works just fine.

Your VIOS servers could also IPL from the SAN or from internal disk.

I have not tried to replicate the VIOS servers via the SAN but it strikes me that this would not be a good idea. It seems unlikely to me that a replicated VIO server would be any level of happy at all if IPLed onto another system. That said, I've not tried it either. Dang another thing for the 'some day' list.....

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.Frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com - Personal Development IBM i timeshare service.
www.iInTheCloud.com - Commercial IBM i Cloud Hosting.

On 11/20/2019 4:46 AM, Tsvetan Marinov wrote:

Hi,

Since 3PAR is not officially supported by IBMi using NPIV, the only way you can present the storage LUN’s, is if you use VIOS and present the LUN’s via vSCSI. In effect every storage array which officially supports AIX can be presented to the VIOS and then virtualised via vSCSI to IBMi.

VSCSI as a technology is not best practice for IBMi, but it’s officially supported and works fine. Of course it will depend what performance requirements you will have from the 3PAR, since not well documented with IBMi.

No problem to boot from SAN and no real reason to use internal disk for load source if you are not using a mirrored pair of nVME drives which are very fast.

Regards

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________________________________
From: MIDRANGE-L <midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> on behalf of Patrik Schindler <poc@xxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Wednesday, November 20, 2019 7:48 am
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Re: Connectin HPE 3PAR to Power 9 and able to IPL from it?

Hello Laurence,

Am 20.11.2019 um 06:58 schrieb Laurence Chiu <lchiu7@xxxxxxxxx>:

What I can't find out though is, can IBMi IPL off a HPE 3PAR SAN?

While I can't answer this one, allow me to ask why you would IPL from SAN? My opinion is, servers have an (often) specific OS and configuration settings as well as licenses are sometimes tied to the hardware. From this PoV, it doesn't make sense to boot everything from SAN. I'd keep the OS on a local disk mirror and have data on the SAN, on ASP > 1.

Besides that, I also don't know about disk blocksize issues. IBM used disks with 522 Bytes per sector for metadata housekeeping, extra vendor-specific SCSI commands and other IBM glitter spray to bless disks. This is also true for not so old hardware like an 8203 (without VIOS). Dunno if these requirements also exist with SAN based storage.

Maybe check with HPE?

:wq! PoC

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