Re: Fibre Channel Tape Sharing on Guest Partition

Rob,
Yes, we share a whole fleet of virtual LTO tape drives from a Crossroads SPHiNX through to many IBM i LPARs with NPIV through two VIOS partitions. Also two drives in our TS3200 library.

DrFranken.



Sent from my iPad

On Nov 22, 2013, at 7:16 AM, rob@xxxxxxxxx wrote:

Do you have san fiber tape support set up through VIOS also?


Rob Berendt
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IBM Certified System Administrator - IBM i 6.1
Group Dekko
Dept 1600
Mail to: 2505 Dekko Drive
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From: DrFranken <midrange@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion <midrange-l@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: 11/21/2013 11:40 PM
Subject: Re: Fibre Channel Tape Sharing on Guest Partition
Sent by: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx



If you have VIOS in the mix you can virtualize like crazy. Both tap and
disk. I just finished a major install with Pete that's all Fiber Channel
storage through SAN Switches and VIO to V3700. Once a few bits are set
up in VIOS you simply create storage on the SAN and attach it to
whichever partition that needs it. Shazam more disk. Tape is the same.

Since VIOS is needed for other advanced functions as well such as
mobility, memory sharing and more, it makes sense that VIOS would bring
all that support first.

- Larry "DrFranken" Bolhuis

www.frankeni.com
www.iDevCloud.com
www.iInTheCloud.com

On 11/21/2013 12:29 PM, Paul Raulerson wrote:
Slightly OT, but I wonder if anyone knows why Fibre Channel support is

so difficult to virtualize? Just in general terms.

Fibre connected SAN storage is a huge benefit to most business

configurations.

Even a tiny system like a DS3500 can support the i - rather the DS3500

supports IBM VIOS 2.1.3 wit h IBM i 6.1 or later. And it can support flash
copy and other. (Okay, for comparison, you can can configure 18TB of raw
storage (i.e. about 13TB in RAID 5) for about $16K. That's significant
change, but how much would it cost to put that much storage directly on an
i?

Or are there just better solutions than I, being way out of date, am

unaware of?

Anyways, it would seem that fibre connections would be one of the first

things virtualized, but it usually seems to be one of the last. Judging by
"i" and VMWare. The zSeries machines can all virtualize fibre connections
(FICON and FibreChannel) without breaking a sweat, but then, those
machines do not have any internal DASD options. :)

-Paul

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