Category Archives: Storage

Checking the status of multipathing in 11iv3

24/11/2011 – 14:46

A common task in a sysadmin’s life is to assist to the changes which are affecting the SAN network. At smaller organizations it could be that besides the system administrator role you also need to manage the storage side.  So here’s a post which might help you if you need to check the status of [...]

By Viktor Balogh | Also posted in HP-UX system administration, Monitoring, Servers | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Cheatsheet: EMC Powerpath on HP-UX

24/05/2011 – 16:08

The latest 11.31 HP-UX version uses native multipathing with the help of the new IO stack. However if you’re on an older version, it was common along many customers to get a Powerpath license from EMC. It is to be used for building an active/active solution. Now here is a quick’n’short cheatsheet for the most [...]

By Viktor Balogh | Also posted in HP-UX system administration, Servers | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Offline migration – minimizing downtime with rsync

12/01/2011 – 12:12

As we all know, downtime is an unavoidable must in some cases. There may be cases when the application need to be migrated to a new system, and it can only be done offline. Even if the downtime can’t be eliminated, you can do some things to minimize it. First, create the new filesystem layout [...]

By Viktor Balogh | Also posted in Backup & Restore, HP-UX system administration | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Some thoughts about mediainit – low level formatting and why it mustn’t be done

02/01/2011 – 14:40

mediainit is neither required nor recommended for most modern disks. In fact, mediainit might damage some (semi-)modern disks. Even the most basic SCSI disks today have a built-in defect management system in the disk firmware/hardware level,  so the OS normally sees the disk as having zero defects. The primary purpose of mediainit was to detect [...]

By Viktor Balogh | Also posted in HP-UX system administration, Servers, System Internals | Tagged , , , | Comments (2)

HSSM CIM extension install

17/08/2010 – 12:47

This guide about installing HP Storage Essentials CIM Extension on HP-UX 11i v1. The following patches are the minimum prerequisites you need to have installed on the system, it may vary depending on the version of your OS. It may be that these are now obsoleted by newer patches, so it might worth a look [...]

By Viktor Balogh | Also posted in HP-UX general, HP-UX system administration | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Changing the queue_depth parameter

25/05/2010 – 13:51

Finally we can get some unusual large LUNs at my customer, but this arose some problems that we didn’t have until now. The read/write performance of a filesystem built from such very large LUNs can suffer if certain scsi parameters aren’t set. Here is an HP document that describes how you can solve this problem:

By Viktor Balogh | Also posted in HP-UX, HP-UX system administration | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

Migrating a ServiceGuard cluster to another storage

03/11/2009 – 14:44

Here are the steps for offline migrating a Serviceguard cluster to another SAN: create a LUN list:no. of source box no. of source LUN size of source LUN no. of target box no. of target LUN size of target LUN

By Viktor Balogh | Also posted in HP-UX Serviceguard, HP-UX system administration | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Business Copy unleashed

24/07/2009 – 23:28

Today we had some trouble with a cluster using Business Copy for backing up the data while the application is running. There is a framework for the automatic conduction of the backup process: it tells oracle to be prepared for the backup (no more write queries for the next x minutes), after that pairs the [...]

By Viktor Balogh | Also posted in HP-UX system administration, LVM and VxVM | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (1)

Displaying the FC load per card

18/06/2009 – 13:30

Here is a nice script for displaying the load of each FC HBA. It collects the data via sar and then summarize it for every FC HBA. It helps you loadbalance the traffic. #!/bin/sh # # get_fcload – mm 2005 # Copyright (C) mm 2005 # # display the throughput per fc-adapter # sar -d [...]

By Viktor Balogh | Also posted in Languages and Scripting | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Calculating the HW path for a LUN

08/05/2009 – 12:02

Ensure that the LUN number is represented in decimal; an HP XP disk array uses hexadecimal LUN numbers while an HP VA disk array uses decimal LUN numbers. The Virtual SCSI Bus starts at address 0. If LUN number is < 128 (dec) then go to step 7 below Increment Virtual SCSI Bus by 1 [...]

By Viktor Balogh | Also posted in Hardware, Servers | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)