[DANNYC]

We have a VIOS with DS6800 disks, SDD installed with 4 fiber cards. Have 15 luns presented to the VIOS and mapped straight to the client lpar as such:

vhost2 Available Virtual SCSI Server Adapter
vhost3 Available Virtual SCSI Server Adapter
vhost4 Available Virtual SCSI Server Adapter
vhost5 Available Virtual SCSI Server Adapter
vhost6 Available Virtual SCSI Server Adapter
vhost7 Available Virtual SCSI Server Adapter
vhost8 Available Virtual SCSI Server Adapter
vhost9 Available Virtual SCSI Server Adapter
vhost10 Available Virtual SCSI Server Adapter
vhost11 Available Virtual SCSI Server Adapter
vhost12 Available Virtual SCSI Server Adapter
vhost13 Available Virtual SCSI Server Adapter
vhost14 Available Virtual SCSI Server Adapter
vsa0 Available LPAR Virtual Serial Adapter
BID_hdisk2 Available Virtual Target Device - Disk
BID_hdisk3 Available Virtual Target Device - Disk
BID_hdisk4 Available Virtual Target Device - Disk
BID_hdisk5 Available Virtual Target Device - Disk
BID_hdisk6 Available Virtual Target Device - Disk
BID_hdisk7 Available Virtual Target Device - Disk
BID_hdisk8 Available Virtual Target Device - Disk
BID_hdisk9 Available Virtual Target Device - Disk
BID_hdisk10 Available Virtual Target Device - Disk
BID_hdisk11 Available Virtual Target Device - Disk
BID_hdisk12 Available Virtual Target Device - Disk
BID_hdisk13 Available Virtual Target Device - Disk
BID_hdisk14 Available Virtual Target Device - Disk

This seems effecient to me but a co-worker seems to think I should have allocated the vpaths to a storage group on the VIOS. These luns will be serving a client running Oracle. Is there a best practice for this? If I use
a SG, I'm using LVM. Then I have to go thru LVM again on the client when
setting up volume groups. etc..... Seems like extra overhead. Or am I missing something??

THanks,

DANNYC

[ross.mather]

Danny, you are right, you would get the overhead a second time of the LVM. Not only that if you do not allocate LUNS directly through the VIO you cannot have redundant VIO servers.

In effect if you do what your co-worker suggests you end up with virtualisation (LVM and LUNs) in 2 places and the system becomes less manageable. I uderstand that some people will do that for test systems - but I wouldn't want to do it for production ones.

[DANNYC]

Thanks for your reply Ross