Install multipathing on RHEL 6.2 - QLogic HBAs

Robert Leong -

Scope

This applies to Venice Servers, Fileservers, StorNext MDS/MDCs with RHEL 6.2 using QLogic Fibre Channel host adapters.  Servers with ATTO Fibre Channel does not apply here, see separate document.

Overview

Need a RHEL 6.x install USB, mount it and set it up as a repository, use yum install to install the device-mapper-multipath.

Newer RHEL versions might already have this installed, do this to check

# chkconfig | grep -i multi
multipathd      0:off   1:off   2:on    3:on    4:on    5:on    6:off

To identify what Fibre Channel cards are installed (QLogic shown here)

# lspci | grep -i fibre
84:00.0 Fibre Channel: QLogic Corp. ISP2532-based 8Gb Fibre Channel to PCI Express HBA (rev 02)
84:00.1 Fibre Channel: QLogic Corp. ISP2532-based 8Gb Fibre Channel to PCI Express HBA (rev 02)

Procedure

This procedure tested on a RHEL 6.2 Venice Server, multipath install using a RHEL 6.6 server install USB.

Setup the REHL 6.6 USB drive as a repository, this is where yum install will get the packages and dependencies from, here is how to it.

Insert the USB stick, it should auto mount and look something like this

# df -h
/dev/sdd1        29G  3.7G   26G  13% /media/RHEL-6_6 SE,

In it there is a media.repo file, copy and rename it to /etc/yum.repos.d/RHEL66_media.repo, then add to the last line "baseurl" to point to the path of the USB.

# cat /etc/yum.repos.d/RHEL66_media.repo
[InstallMedia]
name=Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6
mediaid=1411733344.627228
metadata_expire=-1
gpgcheck=0
cost=500
baseurl = file:///media/"RHEL-6_6 SE"

Might need to do this to clean up any old yum cache

yum clean all

Or cleanup / rename existing repo files in /etc/yum.repos.d that might be pointing to non-existing paths which could cause yum to install to not complete.

Then install

yum install device-mapper-multipath

After the install these and other commands will be available to control / manage multipathing.

multipath
mpathconf

Update /etc/multipath.conf as required

Additional relevant link

DDN multipath settings
http://support.dvsus.com/hc/en-us/articles/115003840863-DDN-multipath-RPM-for-RHEL6-7

 

 

 

 

 

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