IBM DS4100/FAStT100 on stock RHEL4?

[Terje Bless]

Hi all,

Can RHEL4 stock drive an IBM DS4100/FAStT100 without extra drivers or software?


We have a PE2650 with Qlogic (qla2300) HBAs connected to an IBM DS4100/FAStT
storage enclosure. The system is currently running RHEL3 with the IBM provided
software for this array.

We're planning to upgrade this system to RHEL4 — to deal with an otherwise
unrelated NFS performance issue — and since 1) the IBM software is generally
painfull to add, and 2) we know RHEL4 has some improvements in this area; we're
wondering whether stock RHEL4 would be able to drive this array.

Would the combination of RHEL stock Qlogic HBA drivers and the dm-multipath code
let us use this array, including HBA failover (don't need load-balancing),
without having to add the various IBM software bits?


Is anyone running a setup such as this?

Any hints on the key points of setting this up?
(keywords I might look up in docs would be fine)


The box is essentially just a data dump (the hostname is "devnull" ;D); the
array is split into two partitions — mainly due to RHEL3 partition size limits —
which are exported over NFS to an Oracle RAC that writes its rman backups there.

We're having some serious NFS performance issues that we're hoping upgrading to
RHEL4 will just magically solve for us, but we're getting tired of fiddling with
IBM software on every kernel upgrade and would like to take the opportunity of
the upgrade to try a new tack.

If I really have to I can scratch the array and set up partitions etc. again
using other tools. It's a lot of data that'll take forever to pull off of tape
tho' so would prefer not to have to do that.


TIA, -link

-- 
“Allright… Calm down! Relax! Start breathin´…”         -- Dr. D.R.E.