failover clustering - RHEL 4 - driver help?
 

Hello,

I am trying to set up a RHEL 4 cluster with 2 Dell machines, FC3 cables, one zone on a Cisco switch, and a StorageTek D280 SAN. I have been unable to get the machines speaking to the SAN. I did at one time get the Red Hat Cluster Suite loaded on both boxes along with GFS - Global File System.

Here is the local configuration:

/dev/sda 70 GB (actually double since it is 2 disks, RAID 1)
/dev/sdb 300 GB (actually double since it is 2 disks, RAID 1)
/dev/sdc 300 GB (actually double since it is 2 disks, RAID 1)

fdisk -l I am seeing PV's within LVM2. So I see /dev/sdd through /dev/sdo or something like that - basically half the alphabet used up. Redhat provides the device-mapper-multipath-0.4.5-16.1.RHEL4. I am not sure if that handles all of the multipathing or what and I need to find a good tutorial on that in and of itself.

I have created and shared a couple of volume groups called like test_volume and test_vg. dmesg shows them on bootup so the local boxes are definitely seeing the SAN volumes however it is not being served up correctly and handed off to the LUN's. At one point last week I got both boxes to see /gfs that I created, and when I created a file on one machine it showed up on the other with ls. I can probably get back to that point again, but that doesn't solve the overall problem. The network is stable w/static ip's, the rpm's are loaded, the machines are up2dated.

RHEL 4 comes with the lpfc driver which works great with my hba cards (Emulex LPe 11000). The HBA drivers loaded great as well as the HBAnyware utilities. I have updated the firmware on the cards as of yesterday.

I need to get a driver from somewhere. StorageTek (aka SUN) has provided a driver (rdac) -- but it does not support these HBA cards. OTOH these HBA cards are the only cards that we know which are PCI-express and which will fit in the servers. So if I can't make this work with the current configuration, I will have to work with other cards and therefore probably other servers.

At least, the driver does not state that it does, it pretty explicitly says that you need other card models. So for production purposes I don't think it is a supported configuration, even if I was able to get it to work with that driver. Hence I am looking for another driver.

Can anyone help point me to a driver that will be a better choice for talking to the SAN? I am thinking that at some point I should start seeing LUN's and have total end-to-end connectivity, but that hasn't happened yet. Or if anyone knows of something I can do to fix this situation please let me know.


Thanks
Atilla