Enable/configure FC-AL/SAN devices with cfgadm in Solaris

Tagged: Solaris system administration

Solaris 9 requires some tinkering to play with SANs. This recipe describes the procedure.

Note: These steps are not required for Solaris 10 which includes everything you need to connect to a SAN, even to boot from it. If you cannot see your SAN from Solaris 10, check your connections and the SAN (doing a probe-scsi-all from the ok prompt will let you know if the host can see the SAN.. if it can’t, then Solaris will never be able to see it).

The Sun StorEdge SAN Foundation Suite must be installed first. It’s available for download here.

Once that is installed and the host is rebooted, don’t be sad that you still can’t see your SAN. It’s downhill from here. Running the cfgadm command allows you to see your system devices and manage them. Here’s sample output:

# cfgadm -al
Ap_Id Type Receptacle Occupant Condition
c0 scsi-bus connected configured unknown
c0::dsk/c0t0d0 CD-ROM connected configured unknown
c1 fc-private connected configured unknown
c1:1 disk connected configured unknown
c1:1 disk connected configured unknown
c2 fc-fabric connected unconfigured unknown
c2:1 array-ctrl connected unconfigured unknown
c2:9 array-ctrl connected unconfigured unknown
c2:d array-ctrl connected unconfigured unknown
c3 fc-fabric connected unconfigured unknown
c3:8 array-ctrl connected unconfigured unknown
c3:c array-ctrl connected unconfigured unknown
usb0/1 unknown empty unconfigured ok
usb0/2 unknown empty unconfigured ok
usb0/3 unknown empty unconfigured ok
usb0/4 unknown empty unconfigured ok


Note the c2 and c3 entries (of type fc-fabric). These are unconfigured (and therefore inaccessible). In this case, there are two FC-AL host adapters in the system connected to the SAN fabric and these must be configured as with the following commands:

cfgadm -c configure c2
cfgadm -c configure c3

The commands you run (the device Ap_id you need to use) will vary depending on host configuration. After running these commands, the output of cfgadm -al will show these devices and the corresponding LUNs as configured. Running format will now show these devices and you’ll be ready to rock and newfs. If you see errors spewing out on the console about these new devices, don’t worry. You’ll need to label these devices (you’ll be prompted to when selecting each disk in format) and that should quiet the errors.