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Storage Foundation and InfoScale SCSI3 I/O fencing is not supported with devices controlled by the Solaris MPxIO multi pathing device driver

Article: 100016948
Last Published: 2023-01-26
Ratings: 0 0
Product(s): InfoScale & Storage Foundation

Problem
 

Storage Foundation and InfoScale  SCSI3 I/O fencing is not supported with devices controlled by the Solaris MPxIO multi-pathing device driver


Solution


Storage Foundation (SF) and InfoScale fencing deployments use SCSI3 persistent reservations against disks to provide protection from data corruption in the following scenarios:
 
Veritas Cluster Server (VCS) split brain where one large VCS cluster is split into two or more smaller uncoordinated sub clusters
 
Unexpected I/O to disk from a rogue node which should not have access, for example a node which is not a member in a current Cluster Volume Manager ( CVM) cluster or any other  node which incorrectly has access to another nodes shared storage
 
This technology is commonly known as SCSI3 I/O fencing.
 
SCSI3 I/O fencing is supported with a number of SCSI3 enabled arrays when multi-pathing to the array is handled by Storage Foundations native dynamic multi-pathing (DMP)driver. Likewise SCSI3 I/O fencing is also supported in specific configurations using EMC arrays and EMCs PowerPath (PP) multi-pathing driver.
 
SCSI3 I/O fencing requires the ability to be able to guarantee that SCSI3 reservations and registrations are consistently placed, removed, and ejected from specific underlying device paths seen by the operating system in response to common SCSI3 ioctl calls.

This behaviour cannot be guaranteed in all configurations using the Solaris MPxIO multi-pathing driver, and as such we do not support use of SCSI3 I/O fencing in such configurations
 

Further information on supported configurations for Storage Foundation and SCSI3 I/O fencing can be found in the corresponding Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) for the release of Storage Foundation being used. HCLs are available to download from  https://sort.veritas.com/hcl


NOTES:

MPxIO is not supported in Solaris LDOM (Oracle VM for SPARC) environments, I/O domains & LDOM guests
MPxIO is not supported when Veritas DMP_NATIVE_SUPPORT is enabled

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