I recently had the opportunity to directly take questions on SUN's Fibre Channel Solution from customers through BigAdmin . Needless to say it was very insightful because there are things everyday developers assume to be well known but they are not. One of the questions was
What are the actual limits for "LUNs per Target", "Number of Targets" and "Number of MPxIO nodes" supported by Leadville in conjunction with emlxs and qlc drivers?
And I replied, assuming, people know that these limits are on a per HBA port basis and not system wide. I received a few follow ups E-mails asking for the same information. And while I am trying to fix the answer on BigAdmin, I thought it will be a good idea to have that data in my blog. So here it is again:
- LUN limits on a per HBA port basis.
- Qlogic: 16K per target
- Emulex: No limit based on LUNs
- Target limits:
- Emulex: 507 targets per HBA Port
- QLogic:
- 8 targets for the low-cost HBA (QLA210 aka Prism)
- 256 for the 2G HBAs
- 2048 for the 4G HBAs
In future when NPIV will go in i.e. customers can buy a HBA and create many virtual ports per physical HBA port, the LUN limits will be on a per virtual port basis.
And in case you are wondering about the BigAdmin session, the link can be found here.
Hi ! I am using a SUN HBA (X6768A - XG−XPCI2FC−QF2) connected to a SAN Director CISCO MDS9509 and an EMC Symmetrix DMX-3.
The EMC matrix states that the current limit for LEADVILLE/SUN SAN 4.X driver for this SUN HBA is 256 LUNS / port / target.
They mention it is a SUN stated limit not EMC.
Your table mentions 16K LUNs per target for Qlogic HBA. As I know the X6768A is a Qlogic 2310 HBA.
Do you know which number is correct ?
Posted by Alexandre Alves on June 27, 2008 at 11:45 AM PDT #