AIX native MPIO

Hi folks,

does anybody have a link to a documentation how to implement native MPIO on AIX? We are using EMC PowerPath and Datacore SanSymphony/Cambex for this so far and I wasn't able to find a good description on that topic. All I know so far is that mkpath, chpath and lspath are used to create, change and maintain it.
A short description would be ok too, since the man page for mkpath did not really enlighten me :wink:

Thanks in forward.

Greetings
zaxxon

I have gone through one of the doc here and able to grasp the above points
Hope we need to shed some more light to get ur things done

Volume groups other than rootvg normally use virtual SAN disks called vpaths.
The system-side SAN attachment is done through 2 Fibre Channel PCI adapters, connected to 2 independent SAN fabrics. The logical disks on the SAN are attached to each fabric via 2 storage paths, totaling to 4 paths from the host to each LUN.
Each path to a LUN is seen by AIX as a fiber channel disk device
The Subsystem Device Driver (SDD) groups all paths to the same LUN into a multipath virtual device (vpath) which is accessible for IO operations [MPIO] as long as at least one of the component paths is available.
Nivas P

I did not grasp what you want to know. MPIO is a feature of AIX 5.3 that permits devices that are accessed via multiple physical paths to be seen as single disks. AIX MPIO is in the fileset devices.common.IBM.mpio.rte and is part of the base OS. Hence there is no need to implement it beside that you install this fileset.

So if I got it right, MPIO recognizes by itself which paths are available and makes the single volume visible/usable. There is nothing to do with mkpatch, chpath or lspath to configure like load balancing or failover or anything?

I thought you needed those commands to configure something 1st or whatever.

Edit: Also if there is a lot of different paths / SAN volumes visible, maybe I just don't want to handle all of them with MPIO (automatically if that is the case from the writings above). Do I have a choice?