[Info-vax] ES47 2G FC and rx2800 i4 8G FC in same VMS Cluster with Shadowsets on shared storage controller? Is this possible?

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2020-03-13 00:44:44 +0000, Jon Pinkley said:

> We currently have a cluster of two ES47s with 2G FC and an EVA6000 with 
> 4G FC and 4G FC switches (StorageWorks 4/32B, HP relabeled Brocade)
> 
> We want to migrate to Itanium rx2800 i4 or i6 servers and a shared FC 
> storage controller...
> 
> Any pointers to useful documentation would also be appreciated.

Connect and cluster all four hosts with one or preferably more switched 
GbE links or maybe with back-to-back GbE links, with one lobe running 
Alpha EVA 2GFC and the other lobe running i4/i6 16GFC 3PAR and with no 
FC cross-lobe connections, set the cluster expected votes to three, 
give each i4/i6 lobe one vote and give a quorum disk on that lobe one 
vote, shadow your disks across the two lobes, and off you go.

Fully supported, and it'll probably do what you want well enough for 
the duration of a transition.

Obviously, shadowing will limit your performance to what can pass across GbE.

Keep those disks that are getting write-hammered from one architecture 
and/or those disks that don't need to be shared across all hosts 
mounted locally to one lobe.

Using 10 GbE would be preferable to GbE here, but AFAIK that's Itanium 
and PCIe only, and support is not available on Alpha.

Think of the shadowing-via-GbE performance here as your motivation to 
complete the transition expeditiously.


-- 
Pure Personal Opinion | HoffmanLabs LLC