[olug] Fibre Channel on Linux

[Bill Brush]

I haven't done Linux on my SAN yet, but it's on my todo list.

olug-bounces at olug.org wrote on 08/25/2004 10:15:44 AM:

> Hello,
>
> Is anyone here doing Fibre Channel on Linux?  I'm looking at interfacing
a
> Compaq Proliant server to an EMC SAN and am wondering what kind of
results
> I am going to get.  Items that would be helpful:
>
> 1.  HBA you have experience with that work well.

Use whatever is recommended by your vendor.  We use QLogic boards here, but
FC is kind of picky and you don't want to get too far from the vendor
recommendations or you can wind up paying for it.  FC is not as mature as
SCSI or IDE and fiber optic lines are not as forgiving as UTP CAT5 so you
want to make sure the physical layer is solid.

> 2.  Distribution support (Red Hat Enterprise 3 ES was my leaning)

No idea.  Any distro that has support for your HBA should work.

> 3.  General stability.

Stability in this case is the same as any other situation given the OS.
The only added wrinkle is that your disk sub-system is now much bigger and
therefore you have more points of failure in that sub-system.

> 4.  Tools used to manage, expand, etc.

If you're talking about the SAN management, use whatever the vendor
provides.  If you're talking about the HBA, it's managed in the BIOS.  At
the OS level the SAN disks are just going to look like any normal HD.

The big question mark is the HBA support.  Once you have that the rest is
easy.

Bill