AIX SAN boot - ipl_varyon thinks yes, bootinfo thinks no

From: Doug Freyburger (dfreybur_at_yahoo.com)
Date: 12/17/04

  • Next message: Kevin Collins: "Re: The history of the name 'Root' (as in superuser)?"
    Date: 17 Dec 2004 09:43:38 -0800
    
    

    Have folks booted AIX to EMC DMX-3000 arrays? So
    far I've only set up Solaris and maintained AIX
    that was already installed when I arrived.

    I have some AIX 5.1 boxes that currently boot to an
    old EMC Symm5, so I think all of the rev levels are
    high enough. The DMX is at least newer levels.
    The Symm5 is being decommsioned. I have moved all
    of the non-boot data to the new storage and that
    worked great.

    Right now I have rootvg mirrored to both the old
    array and the new array, so if there are any
    problems at least I can boot to the old mirror and
    not need a NIM restore. Right now I have the
    bootlist set to the new then the old, so if the new
    fails it will fall back to the old. The servers
    run an important application so even though they
    are QA and Dev not Prod I still need to go through
    change control to get a reboot scheduled. Not much
    room for poking around and experimenting.

    # ipl_varyon -i
    Gives a YES for both the old and new devices. At
    least I've set up the boot block and the / filesystem
    and so on correctly. It thinks I can boot to the
    new.

    # bootinfo -B
    Gives a 0 (NO) for the new devices and a 1 (YES)
    for the old devices. It is supposed to check all
    of the firmware levels and such to confirm that
    it will work. But bootinfo is an old utility
    from AIX 4.x.

    I am NOT happy that the two tools give different
    answers. It turns on my paranoia bit.

    I'm off site working remotely, so I am not positive
    that I will be able to watch the console while it
    boots. Thus I won't know for certain if the new
    device worked or if it retried on the old.

    My questions:

    1) Once AIX is booted, is there a why to tell which
    side of the the mirror it started out on? The
    list of boot devices is handled before the boot disk
    is mounted so it can't be stored on disk as it
    happens.

    2) Is bootinfo irrelevant because of its age?
    Shoudl I just take the word of ipl_varyon because it
    is the newer tool?

    3) I've done previous AIX migrations using migratepv
    to relocate rather than mirroring rootvg. It works
    to boot to one mirror, right? Kinda defeat the
    purpose of mirroring otherwise. I've mirrored
    across plenty of internal drives just not across one
    EMC array to another.

    Thanks in advance!


  • Next message: Kevin Collins: "Re: The history of the name 'Root' (as in superuser)?"

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