Mounting an IBM XiV LUN onto a RHEL v5 host without installing the HAK

There are two methods of doing this. The first is installing the IBM Host Attachment Kit (HAK). This makes mounting any LUNS from the XiV dead easy, but isn’t what this article is about.

Installing the HAK will blow away your multipath.conf and any changes you might have made to it. What if you wanted to mount the LUN without installing the HAK? What if you wanted to mount LUNs from two different SANs?

This is where manually modifying multipath.conf comes in. I’m documenting the changes that the HAK made to multipath.conf so you don’t need to install it.

blacklist {
    device {
        vendor "IBM-ESXS"
    }
    device {
        vendor "LSILOGIC"
    }
    device {
        vendor "ATA"
    }
    device {
        vendor "VMware"
    }
    devnode "^(ram|raw|loop|fd|md|dm-|sr|scd|st)[0-9]*"
    devnode "^hd[a-z]"
    devnode "^cciss!c[0-9]d[0-9]*"
}
devices {
    device {
        path_checker tur
        product "2810XIV"
        vendor "IBM"
        rr_min_io 15
        path_grouping_policy multibus
        path_selector "round-robin 0"
        no_path_retry queue
        failback 15
    }
}
defaults {
    user_friendly_names yes
}

Pick and choose which bits you want to copy into your multipath.conf, the most important part being the devices stanza of the above config.

Since user_friendly_names is set to yes, this will give the device a name of /dev/mapper/mpathx. But if you don’t don’t like this you can name it whatever you want. To do this, find the wwid of the multipath device with “multipath -l”, then put this into your multipath.conf. Example below:

multipaths {
        multipath {
                wwid    3600507680193818250000000000001e9
                alias   mymount1
        }
        multipath {
                wwid    3600507680193818250000000000001ea
                alias   mymount2
        }
}

Your multipath device (LUN) will then be available as /dev/mapper/mymount1 and /dev/mapper/mymount2.