Solaris I/O Multipathing Configuration Considerations

Before you configure Solaris I/O multipathing features, 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. For more information about power management, see poweradm(1M).

• The STMS boot utility is included with Solaris I/O multipathing features that manage the SAN booting process. Issuing the stmsboot command activates the automatic update of /etc/vfstab and the dump configuration to reflect device name changes when enabling or disabling the multipathing software. Note that the software is disabled by default for devices on SPARC based systems and enabled by default for devices on x86 based systems.

• Fabric-connected devices are configured and made available to the host automatically during installation and boot time.

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  Note - If you are performing an upgrade and want to make any FC devices unavailable after upgrade, you have to be manually unconfigure those devices by using cfgadm -c unconfigure commands. However, to make those devices permanently unavailable to the system, you might 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 FC devices has been enabled. To find out how to disable the FC devices discovery during boot or install, refer to Appendix A, Manual Configuration for Fabric-Connected Devices.

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