SUMMARY: Solaris, sd.conf and LUNs

Two or three weeks ago I posted the following query; Life and work have
intruded on doing the summary, but here it is.

I wrote:

> We're in the process of setting up some SAN equipment with switches,
> FC and arrays behind Veritas, connected to some Solaris servers...
> and the question of needing to reboot to add LUNs has raised it's head.
> Some time back it was fairly well documented and/or understood that to
> avoid rebooting one should max out the sd.conf file and eat the extra
> time taken during the boot searching for non-responding LUNs. This
> seemed to be true regardless of the SAN software vendor (Hitachi,
> IBM and so forth).
> 
> I haven't found any recent documentation or notes to the effect that
> life is any better now and I thought to avoid many hours of digging
> through pages of documentation and web pages by asking if there is
> anyone on list who has recently been dealing with such issues and
> has a definitive answer. Solaris 9 is probably the OS involved at
> this point...

The answer is, as always, many fold.

>From a purely Sun perspective, the answer is "yes, that's the way it is
with the sd driver". Assuming you are using Sun cards out of the box
with third party storage that uses sd, you have to define what you want
before the boot. The time taken to boot searching the non-existent LUNs
is a pain but generally considered worth it; the scan time is allegedly
less on Sparc III than Sparc II processors. Estimated additional time
for an E4xxx series system with 4 targets maxed out to 255 LUNs was
maybe 5 to 10 minutes on the boot (though there was also a quote of a
site where the boot, import and mounting taking 2 hours with a -r...
but there was no configuration size to qualify that so it could just
be a "big rig").

Having said that, if you are using more recent Sun equipment and get to
use the ssd driver instead of sd, then things are far more dynamic;
sd.conf doesn't enter into the equation.

The third aspect is what about those who are not using Sun cards, have
third party equipment and have to use the sd driver?

JNI cards are quite popular (now JNI-AMCC, I guess). As it happens, we
are using JNI 6460's - and it turns out that since mid-October, 2003,
they offer a "no reboot driver" that works with FCX2-6562 & FCX-6562,
FCC2-6562 & FCC-6562, FCE2-1473 & FCE-1473, FCE2-6560, FCC-6560,
FCE-6460 and FCC-6460. See

    http://www.amcc.com/NoRebootDriver/index.cfm

for more information. I was hoping to have personal experience with the
new JNI driver but testing time has been non-existent...
 
I received a dozen or so responses; thanks to Darren Dunham, Greg Shaw,
"<hike1272-sunhelp@yahoo.com>", Jon Hudson, Rich Bonfoey, Bobby Ramirez,
Ryan Krenzischek, Reggie Beavers, Wes Garland, Kun Li and Rob De Langhe
(those being the responses I can find to hand at the time of writing)
for taking the time to answer. If I missed anyone else, thank you too.

My apologies for the delay in summarizing.

Tim
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