Qlogic fibre channel support questions

[Matthew Jacob]

>
> * Does the isp driver support full fabric?  There are some notes in the man
> pages that fabric support "..may be contingent upon the correct firmware being
> loaded".  Would the FreeBSD ispfw firemware be "correct" for a 23xx card?

Yes. That man page item is old, and yes, your experience is generally
best in having ispfw load the 'matched' firmware.


>
> * Would booting from a Qlogic 23xx fibre channel card work fine?  I presume they
> cards come with a standard BIOS, so this just works?

More or less. You have to specity in the  BIOS menu WWN,LUN.

>
> * There is a noted bug in the isp manpage that the driver can get stuck upon
> boot.  I presume this bug is specific to loops, not a fabric?
>
>
Again, an old entry in the man page.

--------------------

The principle issue about booting from the SAN for FreeBSD is like of
either WWN disk namespace support or persistent target ID support. If
you want a longer explanation, poke me to give it.

The short story here is:

a) Set a Hard Loop ID in the adapter BIOS- '77' is a good one. This
will avoid, in loop topologies, an argument between the adapter and
disks over loop ID 0 with hard to predict results from boot to boot.

b) If in a fabric, use zoning so each FreeBSD box sees only its own
disks and nobody elses. This means both switch zoning and lun zoning
if you're doing things like booting from large provisioned arrays.


Neither action is particularly onerous, and the latter is considered
in general one of the 'best practices' anyway.

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Why do you want to boot from SAN? Don't the blades have space for a
local boot disk?