AIX NPIV VNX8000 BFS "No Operating System Installed"

Hello All,

We have some dreaded AIX boot from SAN issues here in Dublin. Summary of situation is as follows:

Migrating from old CLARiiON CX4-960 to New VNX 8000. Using RecoverPoint for migrations (except VMware – use storage vmotion). Physical Windows works fine. Although they are local boot. AIX doesn’t boot. The SMS boot menu sees the AIX boot partition when selecting the LUN to boot from but then complains that there is “No Operating System Installed”.

The AIX LPARs are NPIV and Boot from SAN. During first boot I reduce things down to single path as AIX often has problem with multiple paths for first boot. We have had no problems with NPIV on the CLARiiONs or indeed VMAX.

IBM Suggested upgraded VIOS, POWER Frame Firmware, HBA Firmware. We have done that twice. In one case it seemed to fix the problem in another it made no difference. Being honest our AIX estate is on very old versions of everything so upgrades are a good idea in general but don’t always seem to solve the problem.

Ultimately the problem seems to be a timing issue with AIX Fibre Logons. Specifically around dynamic PIDs on the Fibre Network which then confused the array. EMC have suggested changing the fibre network to WWN Based persistent PIDs. This is not the default for Brocade Fibre Network. I would prefer not change this right away as it involves fibre network wide change and on some switches an outage.

Anyone out there had similiar issues? Any suggested fixes?