There are at least 2 different SCSI reservation .. Both can be managed from either sides.
A SCSI reservation is a lock you put on your device. A lock preventing someone to dig or simply change content of your drive. Usually clusters uses reservation to obtain exclusive access to shared resources.
But if your host crashes (just an example), the disk will hold its lock and you need to remove it before being able to use again the disk. That's why you have to reset scsi reservation from time to time.
While removing a "plain" SCSI reservation requires a single symcli command, removing a SCSI3 PGR (persistent group reservation) requires either a PSE and a SR (from storage point of view) or host-specific commands (ask your beloved sysadmins).
STK can you please be more specific ?? Hpux offers a scsictl command but doesn't have "-p" option... And I don't know if other unixes have scsictl command...
Went through this explanation, might be of some help :
¿SCSI-3 PR, which stands for Persistent Reservation, supports multiple nodes accessing a device while at the same time blocking access to other nodes. SCSI-3 PR reservations are persistent across SCSI bus resets or node reboots and also support multiple paths from host to disk. For SCSI-2 disks, reservations are not persistent which means they do not survive node reboots.
SCSI-3 PR uses a concept of registration and reservation. Systems that participate, register a key with SCSI-3 device. Each system registers its own key. Then registered systems can establish a reservation. With this method, blocking write access is as simple as removing registration from a device. A system wishing to eject another system issues a pre-empt and abort command and that ejects another node. Once a node is ejected, it has no key registered so that it cannot eject others. This method effectively avoids the split-brain condition. ¿
xe2sdc
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Posted May 26th, 2009 03:00