I have a 5.3 P55A server that is SAN attached. It is currently connected to a HP EVA8100. I need to move to a HP 3Par.

The HBA is connected to a Brocade switch which sees the 3Par. The LUNS have been created on the 3Par. The server is visible on the Brocaade as it was once used for a tape library connection. That zoning has been deleted and new zoning has been done.

1) Will cfgmgr command allow the server to see the new 3Par Luns?
2) We want to copy the existing VG to the new 3Par. Can you recommend how to do that?

I haven't done this on AIX but just went through a migration from one array to another on Linux.

General steps:
1) Add the disks from the new array to the same volume group as the existing array
2) Mirror the logical volumes to the new array disks.
3) Remove the mirror of the old array disks leaving only the new array disks.

I could give you exact details for Linux LVM but the commands in AIX are a bit different.

This link is a bit old but seems to suggest a method using AIX commands:
https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/a...au-aixstorage/

This link talks about the idea and may be a bit newer for AIX:
http://www.ibmsystemsmag.com/aix/tip...lvm_mirroring/

P.S. The latter article has at least one hogwash assertion - Many UNIX admins first used LVM on HP-UX - not AIX.

What hogwash? When did HP-UX introduce LVM? AIX introduced it in the very early 90's with AIX 3. That was when "jfs" - journaled file systems were introduced to UNIX (that til then had relied on programs such as divvy to partition disks and I forget how mirroring was done, if at all without resorting to RAID 1. I cannot personally verify it - but I heard from some HP-UX admins that the two systems looked very similiar because HP-UX emulated it where they could - but changed the names of the commands to keep it from being too obvious, For example - the AIX command 'varyonvg' became 'vgvaryon' on HP-UX.

Maybe you can clarify which UNIX (AIX or HP-UX or Solaris or ???) came out first with volume group management - and when. (Another rumor, much of what came to AIX had already been 'started' in S36 aka OS400 (now IBM i)).

My post didn't say whether LVM first EXISTED on AIX or HP-UX. It challenged the assertion that "many" UNIX Admins first learned it on AIX. I first learned it on HP-UX in the mid-90s even though I'd worked on AIX before that and hadn't seen it on those AIX installations. My recollection of AIX in those days was that IBM was working with a company (Harris as I recall) to completely re-write AIX and I suspect they brought in LVM as part of that effort which makes me suspect they borrowed from HP-UX rather than vice-versa but I'll admit I don't know who had it first - just who offered it to me first.

Most of the AIX Admins I've met over the years didn't get on it until much later (late 90s early 2000s) even though it existed well before that. Until then Solaris and HP-UX seemed to have many more UNIX installations. (Not to mention the older AT&T and SCO UNIX offerings from the early 90s.)

I always had a preference for HP-UX especially since they fully adopted System V whereas Solaris just HAD to keep Berkley stuff in their mess even after they brought in System V. Solstice Disk Suite was an abomination that drove many to Veritas Volume Manager on Solaris even at the additional cost. Later HP-UX including VxVM in the base OS as well though you had to pay extra for full features.

The LVM command you suggest existed on HP-UX as a variant of an AIX command is one I never used. Most of the commands in HP-UX were the same as those seen in Linux today though the latter like most Linux commands tend to have more functionality.

EDIT: On checking just now references say LVM existed in AIX "early release" 3.0 in 1989. Other references say LVM was introduced to HP-UX in version 9.0 which was released in 1992. Interestingly the Wikipedia page for AIX releases mentions that the Linux LVM is more like the one from HP-UX. It incorrectly says 9 didn't come out until 1995 but the HP-UX page says 1992. I'm pretty sure that is more likely as in 1995/1996 we were already upgrading to 10.2 and it seems unlikely there would have been a new major release that soon.

a) well, i just felt hogwash was a bit harsh.
b) I have never even seen a HP-UX prompt, so I cannot comment in detail in any way. I taught many HP-UX admins that were moving to AIX - so I will simply refer to "rumor says..."
c) you may be accurate for your area, or even WW as to how most admins learned "howto" do volume management. See a)
d) most of the people migrating to AIX that I taught (from Windows, *nix - time frame 1996-2008) had "little, to no" idea of how volume management could be done - other than how AIX did it. So, errornously perhaps - I was thinking except for those who learned and used veritas there was little going on in the BASE OS delivered.
e) which brings me back to one of the rumors (late 90's early 00's) where the BASE HP-UX did not include a (full) IP stack, and "other stuff" such as volume management. It was available, but at an added fee.
f) Solaris had, (rumor), until 2001-2002 timeframe the most servers installed - but AIX had the most "value" - i.e., fewer servers installed but many times larger than the average AIX server.

In short, maybe you are correct that HP-UX had more servers installed, and even more admins active using volume management between 1990 and 1998 - but after that they would be equal, or perhaps AIX "in the lead".

I thank you for your research! I had not dared guess when AIX 3.0 was in beta (I was working on AIX 2.X in those days and basically missed the AIX 3.X timeframe becoming fulltime AIX starting with AIX 4.1). My first 3 to 6 months was getting used to the ODM and only finally accepting it when I had to start managing 20+ servers and then found it handy to have commands that used something other than three or four files to modify the "storage" setup.

I am getting too old - if recalling "old times" is sounding more and more than "ancient times". Time to go find a rock to hide under @me

a) Yes but I was trying to be amusing which is why I put the smiley on what I said about "hogwash".

b) I'd say you're right about the move to AIX. I know one Fortune 500 employer I left later got rid of both Solaris and HP-UX in favor of AIX. Another employer I left was getting rid of Solaris to implement IBM DB2 and the front end apps were going to be on AIX. (I left not because of the AIX but because I didn't want to just support the 3 app servers they'd end up with given the DB2 was going to be on mainframe or AS400.)


d) When I first learned LVM I had a conceptual problem with it. My question at the time was "Let me get this straight, we add multiple disks into one big one [VG] then break them back down into smaller ones [LVs] again?!" I later learned it was a matter of granularity but at the time it sounded like a pointless thing to do to end up with multiple "disks" for your filesystems. These days I regularly suggest to people they need to dump partitioning in favor of LVM.

e) I don't know that that was ever true for HP-UX but do know it was true for SCO UNIX. Of course in the early days one was far more likely to be using serial terminals and printers than networked workstations. One would use modems with commands like cu (sort of like telent) to connect to remote systems (via dialup) and use uucp (sort of like ftp) for file transfers over those serial connection. I think I still have a copy of the TCP/IP add on package for SCO lying around somewhere. In those days X windows was also a separate add on package.

The first AIX (2.x?) I worked on didn't have TCP/IP so far as I know but it did have SVR4 serial port monitors which caused us some grief as most of our interfaces used serial and the port monitors would blithely shutdown a port if it saw no traffic on it and it took manual intervention to restart. At another AIX installation later they had TCP/IP to serial muxes which was a bit challenging as our app assumed everything had a unique and unchanging tty but those things had non specific ptys (much as today's network connections do) so I had to write wrappers to make them look like they didn't change even though they did.

f) Solaris wasn't around when I first started doing UNIX (which was on AT&T UNIX) and Sun's first UNIX was called SunOS. Solaris was the extension of that which included X Windwos and for a few years the Solaris version had an underlying SunOS version - I think they didn't get rid of that idea until Solaris 8. However, by the time I started looking for jobs again in the 2000s it seemed most of them were for Solaris. Luckily we'd moved our main database from HP-UX to Solaris E10K so I had the experience to get the job. However, my next 2 jobs after that primarily used HP-UX. I'd say more people have migrated to Linux than to any UNIX variant in the last few years though from what I see AIX is the main UNIX people with money use. IBM was actually one of the big proponents of moving to Linux and I recall the commercials they used to have suggesting it.

We're not getting old - We're simply aging like fine wine.

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I remember cu (even used it as a poor-mans HMC, having one system that had a tty to the serial port of a POWER4, and then using other two serial ports on the POWER4 to start two POWER5).

cu + expect == wonderful combination.

I even wrote (manually) sendmail rules to send mail via uucp, before I had figured out how to get the IP stack working on BSD4.2 (and what was a loopback, and class A, class B, class C, subnet masks, and getting ppp-links to work AND route!) - that takes me back 30+ years!

Fine wine indeed! I see the fine - but - I just hope the tasters still think I am as fine as I like to think. (The risk of perception: I had a bottle I had been saving for something special - the cork rotted and the "fine" was gone, sadly.)

IMHO: an OS is a "dime a dozen" - the focus should be on the needs of the application. That is where Linix has been winning because lots of people have been innovating in the GNU/FSF side of things - and Linux was the platform that was open enough to be everyone's sandbox. To stay that way we have community versions (read distributions) of Linix and the more commercial (read closed asin committed to a particular ABI aka feature set) distros - where people consider it normal business practice to pay for support and "managed" updates. IMHO: if Linux development had to depend on what they could do on a commercial (read production) Linix (yes, I know it is supposed to be LinUx, but "*nix" is what my fingers remember!) - and only that - a new OS would be developing for those who wish to innovate.

:smile: time for some "fine wine"