The Host Side Linking pattern for AIX is designed to scan a host in order to establish relationships between:

• Servers (VIO or LPAR) and any external (Storage Volumes on the remote SAN system) or local storage sources (hard drives).

• Local file systems hosted on a host and the device that provides file systems with storage capacity.

• For the virtual disk drives pattern by creating links to the actual physical device(s) providing storage capacity (Storage Volumes, physical Disk Drives on the VIO).

The pattern also creates disk drive nodes for the local disk drives.

The illustration below shows discovered AIX host (LPAR) with the external storage volumes and internal virtual disk drives:

The internal disk drive being virtual, the pattern also retrieves information about the 'real' physical device (in this case the storage volume) that provides storage capacity to the virtual disk:

How it Works

Pattern triggers upon host creation or confirmation, where the OS type attribute is "AIX" or "VIO (AIX)". First, the pattern identifies the different internal drives and/or connected storage volumes, and then creates the corresponding disk drive nodes in the BMC Discovery environment.

The Host Side Linking Pattern for AIX creates the following relationships:

• From host to storage device (disk drive or storage volume). 
• From the local file system to the appropriate storage device (disk drive or storage volume);
• From the virtual disk drives to the appropriate storage device (disk drive or storage volume);

The Host Side Linking pattern for AIX may stop its execution if:

• the host is WPAR;
• the pattern was not able to locate a command’s full path (by using “which” system script);
• no local file systems with correct type (i.e. filesystem type is different from "procfs" or none) were found on the host;
• the pattern was not able to obtain mandatory data using the “odmget” (getODMData function). (Verify that the discovery user is able to run the “odmget” command on the host);
• the pattern was not able to obtain the mandatory data using “lscfg” (getDiskParameters function). (Verify that the discovery user is able to run the “lscfg” command on the host). 

Prerequisites

The Host Side Linking Pattern for AIX launches commands that may require specific execution privileges. The pattern first run commands as the normal user that discovery is using. In case of failure, commands are rerun using PRIV_RUNCMD. In that case, PRIV_RUNCMD will need to be configured to use an appropriate privilege elevation mechanism (see adding privileged execution to commands).
The list of commands that AIX_Storage pattern may run:

• lscfg * — to report vital product data (VPD) information about the system. This information is used for multiple purposes: get physical volumes attributes, finding out the kind of the pv (local, raid, virtual) etc;

• odmget * — to retrieve data from the Object Data Manager (ODM). Valuable information such as NAA ID for the storage volumes and serial numbers can be obtained from this data;

• lspv – to obtain physical volumes on the system;

• lsmpio – to get NAA ID for the storage volumes if previous attempt (using the data from odmget) failed;

• sissasraidmgr – to obtain information about physical disks forming the RAID array (only SAS RAIDs are supported);

• lsvg – to obtain the configured volume groups;

• lsvgfs - to get mappings between a file system and a volume group.
  

  * The pattern wil stop if one of these key commands is unable to run successfully.

Documentation Links

•  Adding privileged execution to commands