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notpeter
Asked: 2011-02-09 13:46:14 +0800 CST

Disk names in Solaris 10 for ZFS: SAS WWN instead of c0t0d0

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I currently have a server running Solaris 10u9 with a SAS enclosure (Dell PowerVault MD1000) filled with SATA disks attached to an SAS card (LSI 3801E). It happily recognizes the 15 disks in the MD1000 and presents them each disk in the traditional solaris form (c1t12d0, c1t13d0, c1t15d0, etc). My home ZFS setup (Nexenta CP3 + LSI 9200-16E + directly cabled SATA disks) presents disks as their SAS WWN ID (ex: c3t600039300001EA56d0). Although this ID is longer, I've found it much easier to troubleshoot because the cabling/slot is irrelevant, ZFS just identifies the disk by ID, if it's connected it finds it. Most manufacturers print the WWN right on the disk's top label, can't get much easier than that.

So how can I get Solaris to identify disks by SAS WWN instead of by the cXtXdX?

solaris zfs sas illumos nexenta

3 Answers

  1. This would be a controller-specific thing. The newer LSI controllers use the WWN format for disk identification. You don't have any options to do this on other controllers.

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  2. Best Answer

    It used to be that you had to enable mpxio to get that type of notation. You may want to try enabling it and seeing what happens.

    http://nilesh-joshi.blogspot.com/2009/08/sun-solaris-mpxio.html

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  3. I don't think you can. Only SAS and Fibre Channel devices have WWNs. These are assigned to a device by the manufacturer. As you have SATA drives in your enclosure there are no WWNs available for Solaris to read.

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