Blog O’ Matty

Getting Emulex adaptors working with Solaris

This past week I wanted to use the Solaris cfgadm utility to unconfigure a few LUNs. When I ran ‘cfgadm -al’, I noticed that the FC adaptors were not visible in the cfgadm output:

$ cfgadm -al

Ap_Id                          Type         Receptacle   Occupant     Condition
c2                             scsi-bus     connected    configured   unknown
c2::dsk/c2t0d0                 CD-ROM       connected    configured   unknown
usb0/1                         unknown      empty        unconfigured ok
usb0/2                         unknown      empty        unconfigured ok

This seemed odd, since I could see the controllers in the vxdmpadm output:

$ vxdmpadm listctlr all

CTLR-NAME       ENCLR-TYPE      STATE      ENCLR-NAME
=====================================================
c1              Disk            ENABLED      Disk
c0              Disk            ENABLED      Disk
c4              EMC             ENABLED      EMC0
c3              EMC             ENABLED      EMC0
c4              EMC_CLARiiON    DISABLED     EMC_CLARiiON0
c3              EMC_CLARiiON    DISABLED     EMC_CLARiiON0

Since the controllers in question were Emulex adaptors, I read through the Emulex admin guide and found that the platform and FC adaptor had to be DR aware to support configure/unconfigure operations. Since I couldn’t locate a “DR aware” label in our vendors documentation, I decided to open a ticket to see if the servers supported cfgadm. After a week or two of chatting with support, our vendor indicated that we would need to use the Sun Leadville drivers to configure and unconfigure LUNs with Emulex adaptors in Solaris systems. This was awesome news, and I am super happy that the lpfc driver will now be installed in /kernel/drv by default! Niiiiiiice.