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(internal drives and/or DS3200). IBM i on all Power blades supports the SAS RAID Controller
module in BladeCenter S; that module is not supported in BladeCenter H. Fibre Channel storage
in BladeCenter S is not supported for IBM i. This section will examine storage concepts for
BladeCenter H first, followed by those for BladeCenter S.
4.1. Storage concepts for IBM i on Power blade in BladeCenter H
In the Power blade environment, IBM i partitions do not have direct access to any physical I/O
hardware on the blade, in the chassis or outside the BladeCenter. In BladeCenter H, disk storage
is provided by attaching LUNs on a Fibre Channel or SAS storage subsystem to VIOS, then
directly virtualizing them to IBM i using the Integrated Virtualization Manager (IVM). DVD access
for IBM i installation is provided by assigning the DVD-ROM drive in the BladeCenter to a blade,
which makes the optical drive available to VIOS. The drive is then directly virtualized to IBM i by
assigning it in IVM. Direct virtualization of the TS2240 LTO4 SAS-attached tape drive is also
supported: the drive is attached to a SAS I/O module in the chassis. Once available in VIOS, the
tape drive is assigned to an IBM i partition in IVM.
4.1.1. Storage concepts for JS12 and JS22 in BladeCenter H
The following diagram presents an overview of storage, optical and tape virtualization for IBM i on
JS12 and JS22 in BladeCenter H:
VIOS accesses Fibre Channel storage via the CFFh expansion card on the blade. Presently, the
QLogic CFFh card has 2 x 4Gb Fibre Channel ports and 2 x 1Gb Ethernet ports. Before reaching
the external SAN, disk I/O operations first travel through the BladeCenter midplane; then through
a Multi-switch Interconnect Module (MSIM) and a SAN I/O module inside the MSIM. The MSIM
resides in slots 7
and
8, or 9
and
10 in the BladeCenter H chassis. The MSIM allows the
standard, or “vertical,” SAN module inside it to connect to a high-speed, or “horizontal,” CFFh
card on the blade. With the 2-port CFFh card, 2 MSIMs with 1 SAN module in each are
supported in the BladeCenter H for redundancy in the SAN connection.
When configuring Fibre Channel LUNs for IBM i (via VIOS) in this environment, the host
connection on the SAN system must include the World-wide Port Name (WWPN) of one or both
ports on the CFFh card. If the Power blade is inserted in the chassis, the WWPNs can be
observed in the AMM using the following steps:
