Unisphere Host Agent Needed on Unity Array?

I am assuming you are using fiber channel. You do not have to have the agents.  The unity drives will show up, but not with Multi Pathing (MPIO).  So each possible path shows up as a independent drive. To fix this, in the past you had to install the EMC AIX ODM device drivers for AIX.  The current AIX ODM 5.3.1.0 for AIX 6.1 and under and 6.0.0.5 for AIX 7 are from last November. They do not currently have any support for Unity storage systems, which doesn't seem very backwards compatible with VNX/Clariion.  AIX sees the disks as "Other FC SCSI Disk Drive", where my vnx shows up with "EMC CLARiiON FCP MPIO VRAID Disk".  If you look at a older post here, you have to request your sales team to RFQ the latest AIX ODM to support this new storage system.This is what my company did.  I'm not sure if powerpath is any better, as its latest version also appears to be from 2015. I had no trouble connecting VMware ESXI hosts.  We do not use any other os.

Justin

Thank you for the reply. I have successfully migrated AIX hosts from a CX4 to Unity using SAN copy and then cutting them over to the Unity. Per the EMC support matrix for Unity and AIX, PowerPath 6.0 SP1 is recommended so we upgraded our PP from 5.3 to 6.0 SP1 on the AIX hosts. All seems good in AIX and they are booting from SAN on Unity too (they were on CX4 and we SAN copied the boot LUNs). To get the AIX host to use the Unity boot LUN and boot successfully we had to go into SMS mode on AIX and manually boot from Unity boot LUN and then once booted modify the bootlist with the Unities boot LUN hdisk #.

correct - right now for AIX with native MPIO you need to go the RPQ route since it is currently not in the support matrix

With an approved RPQ you should get instructions about new ODM and required patches.

Other option is to use PowerPath

But this doesnt have much to do with host agent

According to Unity "Configuring Hosts to Access Fibre Channel (FC) or iSCSI Storage" guide, it doesn't mention Unisphere Host Agent is required to install on the host. And Unisphere Host Agent is used to manage CLARiiON & VNX1/2 Series Storage Systems.

The hosts are running 6.1.9.8 version of AIX. I have PowerPath 6.0 SP1 per the support matrix for Unity to AIX compatibility. I should have no issues whatsoever with the AIX hosts using Unity disks if I disable the Unisphere Host Agent from starting correct? I am just wondering about the AIX ODM...This shouldn't be an issue right? I have migrated everything already off the old CX4 to the new Unity arrays and ran powermt check to remove all the dead hdisks from the AIX host. So far with no Unisphere host agent running all seems good. Thanks.