Novell has put up the SLES10 RC3 pre-release. The big changes with this new release listed by Novell are: * integration with Xen * AppArmor * integrated system management * fully integrated, high-availability storage (Linux MPIO, OCFS2) I especially like the ease-of-use of the Xen domainU installation in YaST. Even though it did not work yet when I last tried it with OpenSUSE 10.2 Alpha, but this seems to have been fixed by now. Another shortfall of the Xen installation is that only loopback filesystems could be used to install to. I usually keep my Xen hosts in LVM. Hopefully, LVM wi

* [http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00814876/c00814876.pdf?HPBCMETA::doctype=file HP Device Mapper Configuration Guide for HP StorageWorks Arrays]

* [http://www.emulex.com/pdfs/wp_linux2_6.pdf Emulex Whitepaper] with Driver parameter list

After seeing a growing number of errors about failing paths on all our mutipath machines (Hitachi DF-600 over QLogic 2340 HBAs), we switched the multipath path checker from tur to readsector0 in /etc/multipath.conf and syslog went silent again.

Abstract

We recently had the possibility to setup a host machine with multipath I/O. Our main goal by performing these tests was not performance but reliability of the SAN connection. Until recently, every hostbus adapter vendor implemented I/O multipathing in a proprietary way in the card's drivers. With QLogic cards, this proprietary handling of multipathing has been deprecated starting with the version 8 drivers (see below). DM MPIO is the preferred form of MPIO on SLES9 and the only option completely supported by Novell SuSE.