This article is translated from the blog article posted by EMC Unified Storage Division (USD) Remote Support, China team.

Recently many customers called us to ask about how to use Host Agent to connect their HP-UX hosts to VNX storage. So today we’ll talk about this.

Briefly there are 10 major steps for manually registering HBA to the storage.

1.     First we should verify the physical connection between hosts and switches, switches and storages. The zoning configurations on the switches should also be correct.

2.     Get the WWN information of HBA cards and storage’s front-end ports.

On the HP-UX hosts, run the following commands to get such information:

# ioscan -funC fc            => Get the device name of FC HBA cards, for example: /dev/fcd0, /dev/fcd1

# fcmsutil /dev/fcd0         => Get the WWN of HBA, for example:

      N_Port Node World Wide Name = 0x500143800422de57

      N_Port Port World Wide Name = 0x500143800422de56

Then we convert the output to Node WWN:Port WWN format. So finally 50:01:43:80:04:22:de:57:50:01:43:80:04:22:de:56is what we want.

On VNX storage, go to Unisphere > System > Hardware > Storage Hardware, find the SP and click on “+“ sign. In this case, we can get the WWN of the A0 FE port.

3.     According to the above WWN information and the zoning configurations on the switches, we can get the matching the HBA cards to the storage front-end ports. For example, fcd0 to A1/B1, fcd1 to A0/B0.

4.     According to the mapping relation in step 3, we can begin to manually register the host HBAs to the storage. Go to VNX Unisphere > Hosts > Initiators, click on the “Create” button, enter the HBA WWN in step 2. Choose the corresponding “SP - port”. Follow the EMC Knowledge Base article ID 31521 to specify the value of “Initiator Type” and “Failover Mode”. For HP-UX hosts, the value should be “HP No Auto Trespass” and “1 ”. Then you can enter the host name and IP address in the “New Host”. If the host had been registered before, select “Existing Host” and then choose the correct one.

5.     Please NOTE that if there are many paths between the HP-UX host and the storage, for example, four paths; then all these four paths should be manually registered.

6.     Now the HP-UX host should be registered successfully. Next what we should do is creating LUNs and the Storage Group. Select the LUNs then add the host to the group. Please don’t forget to specify the HLU (Host LUN ID) for these LUNs. The first LUN should be HLU 0, this will avoid the conflict once we add new LUNs or deleting old LUNs in the future.

         

7.     Then we can scan the newly added LUNs on the HP-UX host. Don’t forget to use the “dd” command to initiate I/Os on each LUN, or the Initiator status in Unisphere will not show as “Logged In”.

# ioscan               => Scan LUNs

# insf-e                => Create device file

# ioscan-funC disk   => Check the device file, for example: /dev/dsk/c15t0d0

# ddif=/dev/dsk/c15t0d0 of=/dev/null bs=1024k count=1024          => Initiate I/Os to the storage 

…

8.     Check the Initiator status on Unisphere, if the status is “Logged In”, then everything is Ok.

9.     If the host has PowerPath (PP) installed, we should check if PP recognizethese new LUNs. Then we can begin to configure the Logical Volume Manager (LVM) and applications.

# powermtcheck

# powermtdisplay dev=all

10.  The following diagram presents all the ports which could be used during the setup of a VNX storage and SAN switches.