How to Migrate LPAR between 2 power trough SAN from VIOs mapped LUN to NPIV

3

I'm trying to migrate LPAR from a power to another. Since my company doesn't have any IBM licence for their migration solution I have to do it trough SAN (using IBM SVC and brocade SAN switches).

A quick view of the current structure :

.-----------------.    .-----------------.
|    OLD_POWER    |    |    NEW_POWER    |
| .-----. .-----. |    | .-----. .-----. |
| |VIO-1| |VIO-2| |    | |VIO-3| |VIO-4| |
| '-----' '-----' |    | '-----' '-----' |
'-----------------'    '-----------------'

So currently my LUNs are mapped to VIO-1 and VIO-2. Since i'm not using NPIV disk are declared in each VIO and then linked to the LPAR.

Example :

VIO-1# lsmap -all
[...]
SVSA            Physloc                                 Client Partition ID
--------------- --------------------------------------- -------------------
vhost1          U9117.MMA.069F630-V1-C34                0x00000015

VTD                   myhost_hdisk1
Status                Available
LUN                   0x8200000000000000
Backing device        hdisk1
Physloc               U789D.001.DQD809V-P1-C1-T1-W5005076801303932-LB000000000000
Mirrored              false

Now on the NEW_POWER as said I'm using NPIV wich means I'll map my volumes directly to the LPAR and not to the VIOs. To do so I've done the zoning on my switch and declared my host on the SVC. Before the migration I've deleted all VTD from my VIO-1 and VIO-2 for a given host :

VIO-1# rmvdev -vtd myhost_hdisk1
myhost_hdisk1 deleted
[...]
VIO-1# cfgdev
Method error (/etc/methods/cfgscsidisk -l hdisk1 ):
    0514-082 The requested function could only be performed for some
             of the specified paths.

I then unmap my LUNs from VIO-1 and VIO-2 and mapped them to the new LPAR directly. Booting in SMS mode and scanning SAN devices my hdisk are founded. But when I'm booting on the bootdisk I'm getting a 0554 error. Wich means :

The boot device could not be opened or read, or unable to define NFS swap device during network boot.

So I was wondering if it's possible and if it's what I'm missing ? I thought that maybe VIO-1 and VIO-2 locked the volumes making them unwrittable but I don't realy know if it's the case. How can I migrate a LPAR between 2 powers using SAN only ?

ibm
aix
asked on Server Fault Jun 8, 2018 by naurel

1 Answer

2

I've found out what was missing :

In order to read an IBM SAN disk trough NPIV the AIX must have theses 2 software installed :

devices.fcp.disk.ibm.mpio
devices.sddpcm.71 or devices.sddpcm.61 (depending of your AIX version)

They can be found here and here.

Once I've install theses 2 packages and re-run my migration everything went well.

answered on Server Fault Jun 11, 2018 by naurel

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