Qlogic fibre channel support questions

[Tom Samplonius]

On Mon, 27 Feb 2006, Matthew Jacob wrote:

> Okay- let me ask why diskless booting doesn't work for you?

   Because NFS is slow.  A locally disk (or a SAN attached disk, which is 
essentially the same to FreeBSD) is going to be faster than NFS, no matter what.

> I'm playing diabocolus advocatus here because to me SANs are so
> unforgiving that trying to boot off of them often leads one into the
> situation that the systems can't run long enough to tell you they
> can't run because the SAN is AFU.

   Yes, there are probably more bad SANs, that good SANs.  However, with the 
QLogic cards supporting multipathing on boot devices, I don't think this should 
be an issue.  And the SAN switches and the array controller supports out of band 
management, so if the SAN goes down, the switches and the array are going to 
know more about it, than FreeBSD could even.

   And, BTW, unlike a SAN, NFS servers are always 100% available. :)

> Anyway- enough of this. It's what you want, and its reasonable. Dunno
> what you meant about the license- don't tell me one of the switch
> vendors is slicing and dicing costs based upon zone size? Grrr.....

   Array controllers are typically licensed by the number of partitions.  Or, 
sometimes licesed by the number of attached hosts.  Either way, the result is 
the same:  charge more $$ for more hosts.

   IBM's licensing seems much more sane than EMC, especially for mid-range boxes 
(IBM DS4300 vs EMC CX300).  The DS4300 is quite a bit cheaper, licenses for the 
maximum number of partitions supported by the hardware (64), than a CX300, when 
licensed for 8 hosts.  Assuming one partition per host, I can connect up to 64 
hosts to the DS4300.  More if FreeBSD had a cluster file system, and could 
support shared partitions.



Tom