Chapter 2 Fibre Channel Configuration Overview

This chapter provides information about configuring the Solaris OS Fibre Channel (FC) and Storage Multipathing software. The following topics are discussed:

Configuration Task Overview

This section provides a high level overview of the tasks that you should perform to configure the Sun StorageTek Traffic Manager software.

The following table lists the configuration tasks, description about each task and the reference information where you can find the procedures to perform each task.

Table 2–1 Tasks to Configure Solaris OS FC and Sun StorageTek Traffic Manager Software


Configuration Task	Task Description	Reference Information
Enable Multipathing	Multipathing capability is provided by the Sun StorageTek Traffic Manager software in the Solaris Express Developer Edition OS. This software enables multipathing: By default, for Fibre Channel-attached devices on x86/x64 platforms By manual configuration on SPARC platforms By manual configuration for SAS devices	The steps for enabling multipathing are outlined in Chapter 4, Configuring Multipathing Software.
Configure Fibre Channel Devices	In the Solaris Express Developer Edition OS, FCAL, fabric, and point-to-point connected devices are made available to the host. This feature differs from previous versions of the Sun StorageTek Traffic Manager software running on the Solaris 8 or 9 OS. In those versions, manual configuration steps were required to achieve fabric-connected device availability on the Solaris host.	Chapter 5, Configuring SAN Devices
Configure Virtual Fibre Channel Ports	You can configure N Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) ports, which is especially useful for virtualization environments such as xVM.	Chapter 6, Configuring Virtual Fibre Channel Ports
Set up FC Boot Device	The Sun StorageTek Traffic Manager software enables a Solaris server to boot from a fabric device.	SAN Device Considerations
Configure IPFC SAN devices	You can configure host recognition of IPFC devices and implementation of IP over FC in a SAN. Configuration of IPFC depends on the instance of the Fabric Port (FP) driver for the FC adapter ports.	Chapter 9, Configuring IPFC SAN Devices
Configure SAS Devices	In the Solaris Express Developer Edition OS, multipathing of SAS devices is supported.

Configuration Considerations

Before you configure the Sun StorageTek Traffic Manager software, consider the following:

Configure ports and zones according to the vendor-specific documentation for storage and switches.
LUN masking enables specific LUNs to be seen by specific hosts. See your vendor-specific storage documentation that describes masking.
Power management needs to be disabled for hosts and devices on a SAN. See power.conf (4) for details about power management.
The STMS Boot utility is included with the Sun StorageTek Traffic Manager software that manages the enable and disable process needed for SAN booting. Issuing the stmsboot command allows the automatic update of /etc/vfstab and the dump configuration to reflect device name changes when enabling or disabling the Sun StorageTek Traffic Manager software. Note that the software is disabled by default with SPARC devices and enabled by default with x86 devices.
For Sun Solaris Express Developer's Edition OS, fabric-connected devices are configured and made available to the host automatically during install and boot time.

Note –
If you are performing an upgrade and want to make any Fibre Channel (FC) devices unavailable after upgrade, those devices have to be manually unconfigured using cfgadm -c unconfigure commands. However, to make those devices permanently unavailable to the system, you may want to consider using switch zoning or LUN masking. The changes made by cfgadm -c unconfigure do not persist after a reboot unless manual configuration for fabric-connected devices has been turned on. To find out how to disable the fabric devices discovery during boot or install, please refer to Appendix A, Manual Configuration for Fabric-Connected Devices