[HECnet] Problems with Alphaserver ES45 and FC disks

[John H. Reinhardt]

On 11/4/2019 9:59 PM, Ian McLaughlin wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> I recently acquired/rescued a rack of Alphaserver gear that was going to get scrapped.  In the rack is two ES45 servers (with no local drive cages), and a 3-shelf HSG80 Fibre Channel disk system. There were no drives, but I have plenty of this form factor and so I’ve fully populated all three shelves.
>
> The original system apparently ran Tru64 Unix, but I don’t have much interest in that. I’d love to get the two machines running in an OpenVMS cluster.
>
> I’ve managed to figure out the HSG80 array, and I am serving up acouple of FC LUNs.  I can verify this because I’ve got wwidmgr on the Alpha’s to see and create a drive (dgb2).
>
> However, when I attempt to boot OpenVMS Alpha 8.4 from CD-ROM, the install process doesn’t recognize the FC drive and offer it as an installation target.
>
> Is anyone familiar with this generation of gear and possibly give me a pointer or two about what I might be doing wrong?
>
> Perhaps I need a newer OpenVMS install? Is there ISO images of various versions lurking around hecNET that anyone is willing to share?
>
> Thanks for any suggestions!
>
> Ian
>
I used to have an HSG80 that I used with some DS20 and AS1200 Alphaservers.  V8.4 should be fine. I used V8.3.  Make sure that your FC HBA are supported by OpenVMS.  Some that worked for Tru64 didn't work with OpemVMS.  I think WWIDMGR would still see them in either case.  Also make sure that the LUNS you create on the HSG are marked as VMS disks.  There's a flag, I don't remember the command, but if it isn't set, then OpenVMS won't see them.  You might post the output of a SHOW DISK xxx from the HSG.


Also, IIRC the HSG has "connections", if those aren't set to OpenVMS then you might have problems.  It's been about 5 years since I've done this so I'm trying to remember any problems that I had.

-- 
John H. Reinhardt