Edit: Some links no longer work.
Originally posted October 1, 2013 on AIXchange
Recently a customer was presenting some LUNs to some NPIV clients on a server. There were many LUNs and many clients, and the SAN guys wanted all of them to appear on the switch so they could begin zoning them.
I remembered reading this Chris Gibson article about the chnportlogin and lsnportlogin commands that you can run on the HMC command line:
“There are two new HMC (V7.7.3.0) commands that can force a client Virtual Fibre Channel adapter to log into a SAN. This should make the life of the AIX and SAN administrator easier, as they will no longer need to install AIX in order for the new VFC adapters to log into the SAN. Although there was an unsupported method* for doing this already (see links below). Nor will the SAN admins need to “blind” zone the WWPNs.”
For instance, we could run…
chnportlogin –m Server1 –o login –id 84
lsnportlogin -m Server1 –filter lpar_ids=84
… and see something like the code in this Word document:
This output was also helpful in that it provided the wwpn information for each client.
One of the LPARs had issues, so we were able to log out, log back in and then verify the information with these commands:
chnportlogin -m Server1 -o logout –id 72
chnportlogin -m Server1 -o login –id 72
lsnportlogin -m Server1 –filter lpar_ids=72
For usage information you can just run the commands on the HMC command line:
chnportlogin
Usage: chnportlogin -o login | logout
-m
-p | –id
[-n ]
[-w ]
[-d ]
[-v]
[–help]
This performs N_Port login and logout operations for virtual fibre channel client adapters that are configured in a partition or a partition profile:
-o – the operation to perform:
login – log in the virtual fibre channel client adapters
logout – log out the virtual fibre channel client adapters
-m – the managed system’s name
-p – the name of the partition for which the operation is to be performed
–id – the ID of the partition for which the operation is to be performed
-n – the name of the profile for which the operation is to be performed
-w – the maximum time, in minutes, to wait for VIOS commands issued by the management console to complete
-d – the level of detail to request from VIOS commands issued by the management console – values range from 0 (none) to 5 (highest)
-v – enables verbose mode
–help – prints this help
lsnportlogin
Usage: lsnportlogin -m
[-w ]
[-d ]
–filter “”
[-F []]
[–header]
[–help]
This lists WWPN login status for virtual fibre channel client adapters.
-m – the managed system’s name
-w – the maximum time, in minutes, to wait for VIOS commands issued by the management console to complete
-d – the level of detail to request from VIOS commands issued by the management console – values range from 0 (none) to 5 (highest)
–filter “” – filters the WWPNs to be listed. The syntax is:
“filter_name1=value,filter_name2=value,…”
or
“”filter_name1=value1,value2,…”,…”
Valid filter names are:
lpar_ids, lpar_names, profile_names
-F [] – delimiter separated list of the names of the attributes to be listed. If no attribute names are specified, then all attributes will be listed.
–header – prints a header of attribute names when -F is also specified
–help – prints this help
Chris’s article cites this additional information:
* How to force a vfc-client device to log in to the SAN (The OLD way)!
* How to Capture SAN Boot Debug for Virtual I/O Server and AIX on P6 Systems
* Disk path design for AIX including SAN zoning
Be sure to read the article, and give the instructions a try the next time you’re setting up NPIV.
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