Best Practices for Installing the HBA
Best Practices for Installing the HBA
Before installing the HBA into the system, review the best practices in this section to avoid
potential issues:
■
“General Best Practices” on page 18
■
“Best Practices For Switches and Zoning” on page 19
■
“Best Practices For Booting From SAN (BFS) Configurations” on page 19
■
“Best Practices For Testing the Environment” on page 20
General Best Practices
Follow these general best practices for installing and configuring the HBA:
■
Spread the I/O load amongst multiple HBAs and multiple ports to avoid bottlenecks and
promote higher availability.
■
Use fixed link speeds instead of auto-negotiation wherever possible. While the HBA
supports auto-negotiation, auto-negotiation slows things down in the event of a fabric
rebuild.
■
Do not configure both tape devices and disks on the same HBA port, even if using a switch
and zoning.
■
If more than one of a given HBA model is present in the configuration, enable only the
OpROM for the first HBA seen in the boot sequence. There is a limited amount of space for
OpROMs, so do
not
unnecessarily enable all OpROMs, as space usage issues might occur.
■
When installing the HBA, be sure to also install the latest version (version 11.1.218.x
or newer) of the command-line utility available from the manufacturer's website (See
“Installing Utilities for Updating the BIOS and Firmware” on page 33
). Keep the HBA
utilities, firmware, and drivers up-to-date, and update them in that order.
■
After installing the OneCommand Manager CLI utility, ensure that the
elxhbamgrd
daemon
process is running (The OneCommand Manager utility starts this daemon process, by
default, upon installation.). In the event of a failure, the
elxhbamgrd
daemon produces a
usable firmware dump for troubleshooting. The location of dump files varies, based on your
operating system:
■
Windows:
OneCommandManager-installation-directory
\Util\Dump
■
Oracle Solaris:
/opt/ELXocm/Dump
■
Linux:
/var/log/emulex/ocmanager/Dump
Keep in mind that manual firmware dumps do not collect fatal firmware errors. If the
OneCommand Manager utility is installed and running, the HBA firmware detects a
18
StorageTek Dual 8Gb FC Dual GbE HBA, ExpressModule, Emulex Installation Guide For HBA Models SG-
XPCIEFCGBE-E8-Z, SG-PCIEFCGBE-E8-Z, SG-XPCIEFCGBE-E8-N, SG-PCIEFCGBE-E8-N and 7105393 • August
2018
