In a previous blog entry I noted that Sun's FC and SCSI driver stack lets you use certain third party storage arrays automatically and without the need for the vendor's own multipathing software. Here are some follow ups to the comments I got.
One, why use mpxio? Its free, tightly ingrained with Solaris compared to third party software, and it works with multiple vendor's storage arrays. You might miss out on some of the more exotic multipathing modes like "least frequently used path with a WWN that ends in 4" but I don't find many people that use them. "Are you using random or sequential i/o?" applies to the vast majority of the situations I've seen
Two, tipaza asks about non-Sun HBAs working with mpxio. We've had this working for awhile now but, as with the other storage array vendors, you need to get support for those HBAs from the vendor. Both Emulex and Qlogic have HBAs that automatically work with the Sun driver stack, aka leadville. Find your HBA and see if it works to be sure but the majority of recent HBAs from those two vendors work just fine.
Three, Andrea C asks how someone can use arrays not in the list. Unfortunately, you can't. There are some shady hacks on the net that make mpxio/scsi_vhci think an asymmetric array is a symmetric array but that is a really bad idea. You'll find yourself in a real bad spot if you do that and something causes a path failure.
