San Volume Controller Operating Environment - IBM 2145-8F4 Installation Manual

units of space within a managed disk (MDisk) group. An MDisk group is a
collection of MDisks that are presented by the storage subsystems (RAID
controllers). The MDisk group provides a storage pool. You choose how each
group is made up, and you can combine MDisks from different manufacturers'
controllers in the same MDisk group.
Note: Some operating systems cannot tolerate other operating systems in the same
You can remove one SAN Volume Controller node in each I/O group from a
cluster when hardware service or maintenance is required. After you remove the
SAN Volume Controller node, you can replace the field replaceable units (FRUs) in
the SAN Volume Controller node. All communication between disk drives and all
communication between SAN Volume Controller nodes is performed through the
SAN. All SAN Volume Controller node configuration and service commands are
sent to the cluster through an Ethernet network.
Each SAN Volume Controller node contains its own vital product data (VPD). Each
cluster contains VPD that is common to all the SAN Volume Controller nodes in
the cluster, and any system that is connected to the Ethernet network can access
this VPD.
Cluster configuration information is stored on every SAN Volume Controller node
that is in the cluster to allow concurrent replacement of FRUs. When a new FRU is
installed and when the SAN Volume Controller node is added back into the
cluster, configuration information that is required by that SAN Volume Controller
node is read from other SAN Volume Controller nodes in the cluster.

SAN Volume Controller operating environment

You must set up your SAN Volume Controller operating environment using the
supported multipathing software and hosts.
Minimum requirements
You must set up your SAN Volume Controller operating environment according to
the following information:
v Minimum of one pair of SAN Volume Controller nodes
v Minimum of two uninterruptible power supplies
v One master console per SAN installation for configuration
Features of a SAN Volume Controller 2145-4F2 node
The SAN Volume Controller 2145-4F2 node has the following features:
v 19-inch rack mounted enclosure
v Two 2 Gbps 2-port fibre-channel adapters (four fibre-channel ports)
v 4 GB cache memory
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IBM System Storage SAN Volume Controller: Installation Guide
host zone, although you might have more than one host type in the SAN
fabric. For example, you can have a SAN that contains one host that runs on
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an AIX operating system and another host that runs on a Windows
operating system.
Note: Depending on how you ordered your SAN Volume Controller, the master
console can be preconfigured on your platform or delivered as a
software-only package.
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