How to enable fiber channel multipathing on Solaris 10 server

The Solaric FC and Storage Multipathing software is integrated with the Solaris 10 operating system. There is no need to separately install the software package during or after the Solaris 10 OS installation.

In Solaris 10, fabric-connected devices are configured and made available to the host automatically during install and boot time. If your HBA interface is on the SUN hardware compatible list then the drivers will be automatically loaded during installation.

On SPARC server multipathing is disabled by default. To enable this you will need to edit the file /kernel/drv/fp.conf with the vi editor.

# vi /kernel/drv/fp.conf

Change the following line to enable multipathing globally:

mpxio-disable=”yes”;

to

mpxio-disable=”no”;

Run stmboot to automatically update /etc/vfstab and the dump configuration with the new device names.

# stmsboot -u
WARNING: This operation will require a reboot.
Do you want to continue ? [y/n] (default: y) y
The changes will come into effect after rebooting the system.
Reboot the system now ? [y/n] (default: y) y

When the system reboots you may see the new SAN drive with an error message Corrupt label; wrong magic number. Do not worry about this, when you format the new SAN drive you will also be prompted to label it.

If multipathing is not enabled and you have more than one HBA cards connected to the same LUN on the SAN, the new SAN LUN will show up as different drives in Solaris. This is because there is more than one path to the drive, each HBA card will have it’s own path. With multipathing enabled only one LUN drive will be displayed.

To format the drive simply run the below command.

# format

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Hi, I have always wanted to creat a blog site but never had the time. I have been working in Information Technology for over 15 years. I specialize mainly in networks and server technologies and dabble a little with the programming aspects. Andrew Lin

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