AIX with HP EVA Storage subsystem

Few days ago i was asked to get control of a situation where an AIX server has to be connected to HP EVA storage subsystem. It was EVA 8100 , which is considered to be a mid range subsystem from HP.

Customer was trying to install AIX ( SAN boot configuration ) on HP EVA Luns and after two to three tries , he was successful in installing AIX but when system came up , rootvg was appearing on 8 hdisks.

So far so good, but when he tried to install any additional software on AIX , he started getting bosboot verification error.

Ok,Now at this stage , i got involved. When i tried to search for AIX and HP EVA storage combination i got shocked. There were not many hits in IBM case , even google was not able to find many hits....The only important information which i got was that if your HP EVA firmware is below 6.xx , then you will face severe performance problems with AIX as in that case your AIX hdisks will be having queue depth of "one" which thereby result in giving single path to Lun in essence.

Ok first of all , i found that HP provides two /three multi path drivers for AIX. Infact AIX built-in MPIO device drivers can not work successfully alone with HP EVA. These MPIO drivers have to be used in conjunction with "other multi path drivers " for AIX which are available on HP website. So i downloaded these drivers from HP .


As a first step i asked customer to upgrade Firmware of EVA to latest level. While done, i switch the AIX host to single path configuration and then with only one disk ( hdisk0 ) i reinstalled AIX 6.1.

After machine rebooted , I installed HP MPIO device driver on AIX using smitty installp and then rebooted again. Now i still getting one hdisk with rootvg but now AIX MPIO command lspath is reporting eight paths ( as expected ). Also hp MPIO command hsvcpath are now showing eight paths ( out of which four paths are active and remaining four are inactive , waiting for other four to fail for takeover).

Now by executing lsattr -El hdisk0 , I was getting queue_depth value of eight , which is 100% correct. Task was done sucessfully...