geom_fox and isp ... or something else?

[Christian Brueffer]

On Wed, Nov 22, 2006 at 01:16:07AM -0500, Paul Chvostek wrote:
> Hiya.
> 
> ${DAYJOB} has a long history with Novell.  In the epic battle I wage for
> acceptance of FreeBSD alongside SLES, multipathing has come up.
> 
> We have a nifty new SAN.  We have multipathing-capable drivers for
> Windows.  We have instructions from Novell on how to set up multipathing
> in SLES (though some list traffic that suggests that Qlogic behaviour is
> less than stellar).
> 
> I've been able to wheedle a pair of Qlogic cards (purchased because
> corporate standards are more important than verifying a product's
> usefulness) connected to a box for testing.  The SAN is insanely fast,
> but of course multipathing doesn't work.
> 
> I've seen Pawel's GEOM_ROME tease from early 2004.  While I'd love to
> have a "full, finished multipathing implementation", I'd also happily
> stick with geom_fox with whatever hardware combination or custom hacks
> are required, if I could just get it to pass a link failure test.
> 
> I'm seeing the same behaviour as has been noted -- if the link goes
> down, isp doesn't notice, so no failover happens.  When the link is
> down, the system grinds to a halt waiting for the disk to be available.
> 
> I've found old freebsd-geom posts (Poul, Pawel, Andrew) that mention isp
> driver problems and potential patches, but if somebody's written a fix,
> I can't find it.  Does it exist?
> 
> If Qlogic adapters are a no-go (because I can neither write nor fund the
> required fix), has someone gotten FC multipathing to work with Adaptec
> or LSI adapters?
> 
> *Is* there a way to get fibre-channel multipathing working, so this
> expensive SAN can be used with an OS more robust than Windows?
> 
> - 6.1-RELEASE
> - isp0, isp1
> - ispfw
> - /dev/da1 through /dev/da8 (paths)
> - geom_fox gives me /dev/da8.fox
> 
> I am in a position to test things.
> 

Matt Jacob (mjacob@) is working on multipath/failover support for
isp(4).  You should check out the isp(4) driver in CURRENT and his
perforce branch, //depot/projects/newisp .

- Christian

-- 
Christian Brueffer	chris at unixpages.org	brueffer at FreeBSD.org
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