Masking of vendor/product when using HP LOGICAL VOLUME.

[rzeszutek]

Hey,

I was wondering if there is feature/bugfix in the works to mask the local disks vendor/product information when exporting the targets via iSCSI? I am asking this b/c of a problem one of our customers ran into.

(a more detail explanation is available on https://www.redhat.com/archives/dm-deve ... 00300.html)

On Linux, when multipath is used on the iSCSI initiator, it uses a simple mechanism to figure out what applications to measure the "health" of the block disks. The mechanism it uses is based on the vendor/product match. The HP LOGICAL VOLUME array is on the list (was added in SLES10 SP2 release). The health-o-meter (path checker) written by HP guys assumes that this is a locally based storage that HP released. But with the StarWind product, the disks onthe iSCSI target machine are exported without masking the vendor/product. So multipath happily matches the vendor/product with the disks that showed up through the iSCSI session and starts this path-checker tailored exclusively for LOGICAL VOLUME array (the path checker is called cciss_tur). The cciss_tur expects the
disks to be handled by the local SmartArray controller and does the ioctl call thinking it would be talking to a cciss driver. Well... this being iSCSI and SCSI not understanding that ioctl it fails and marks the path as failed.

A simple fix is to mask the vendor/product so that the local disks names are not used. Hence I was wondering if this is something in works, or maybe there is flip in the configure of your product to do this?

Thanks.

[Robert (staff)]

Hello,

Looks like you are using SPTI device type. Try using DiskBridge or image file devices.

Let us know if that helps.

Thanks,
Rob