Share firewire storage between 2 sun blades
I am having trouble seeing my firewire storage on both blades.
I am able to connect a Maxtor OneTouch 250gb firewire drive to a SunBlade 100 running Solaris 10. It is discovered and I can configure it with rmformat.
The problem comes in when I want to attache it to a second sun blade at the same time. The drive is recognized but not configurable i.e. rmformat does not se it. I have seen that it is possible to do this in linux by downloading and installing oracle supplied packages.
I know there is a similar problem on linux that a package that oracle provides solves. Is there any way to do this in solaris.
[645 byte] By [
graziafm] at [2007-11-25 23:02:50]
# 1
You know perhaps Oracle only provide this patch for Linux, as Linux is developed around off the shelf PC hardware. Oracle products offered for use with Sun systems are usually aimed at the low end to high end enterprise server market, not desktops. These servers would traditionally be used with Network, Fibre Channel or SCSI attached storage configured with RAID, not a single Firewire external disk. Sounds bizzare to me.
# 2
That is correct. However, we have an opportunity to use sun blades as a small isolated test bed and we only have the fire wire option at this point. I am not trying to say one OS is better than another I just want to know if it is possible to share this firewire storage with two blade servers running Solaris 10.
# 3
Ok, I wasn't suggesting that you thought one product was better than the other, I just thought this is very unusual configuration. Are you planning to set up some kind of Oracle failover system on SPARC? As I said Solaris on SPARC was designed to attach to a different storage architecture than firewire, that's not to say that it won't work though. If I were testing this type of set up I'd choose FC or SCSI. Maybe someone else has experience setting up Solaris/Oracle on external firewire hardware?
# 4
We are planning to have the two blades share the storage so we can install oracle 10g RAC. The only storage we have is firewire and we do not have the budget to outfit theses blades with Fc or SCSI. I know we can always use NFS shares or ISCSI. However, that kind of defaets the purpose of a HA system. I am hoping someone has done somthing like this before and can shed some lite on this for us. I brough up the linux thing because it was mentioned that an sbp2 option was set to allow multiple hosts to login to access the firewire storage. The parameter in linux was in a modprobe.conf file "options sbp2 exclusive_login=0". I know the architecher and code is different between linux and Solaris but I did not know if there was something similar in Solaris.
# 5
I still don't think that you will get a decent feel for HA by using a single firewire disk to emulate the storage behavior within a cluster. If you are company based in Europe I may be able to help you with a better storage to test your applications. You can email me though the address in my profile, I have some redundant equipment ( jni fci-1064 cards ) I could loan out provided I don't have to pay any shipping charges.
But another better idea is that you contact your local Sun solution center. Sun and Oracle have an offer on at the moment, certain servers can be purchased with a free database. The local solution center is there to develop and demonstrate solutions for customers, Sun Cluster and Oracle RAC solutions are in big demand, so there will be alot of information available for your company. Contact Sun.
# 6
<table border="0" align="center" width="90%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td class="SmallText"><b>graziafm wrote on Thu, 09 February 2006 05:02</b></td></tr><tr><td class="quote">
.... I am hoping someone has done somthing like this before and can shed some lite on this for us. I brough up the linux thing because it was mentioned that an sbp2 option was set to allow multiple hosts to login to access the firewire storage. The parameter in linux was in a modprobe.conf file "options sbp2 exclusive_login=0". I know the architecher and code is different between linux and Solaris but I did not know if there was something similar in Solaris.
</td></tr></table>
I think that in order to share storage between hosts you either need special filesystem support like shared-QFS, or you need Solaris Volume Manager's shared diskset functionality (see "man metainit"). However, I found that disksets make use of unique disk id's, which are not yet supported with USB and firewire disks. Here are a couple of discussion threads which describe my recent experience in this area:
<a href="http://forum.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=28803&tstart=15" target="_blank"> http://forum.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=28803&tstart=1 5</a>
<a href="http://forum.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=27838&tstart=15" target="_blank"> http://forum.sun.com/thread.jspa?threadID=27838&tstart=1 5</a>
You may have better luck with Solaris Express, which is where the newer USB/firewire code shows up earliest.
