HBA modeling

Host Bus Adapter (HBA) modeling provides the ability to determine which firmware version is running on individual Fiber Channel HBA cards in the network under Discovery and report on them.

Supported platforms

HBA modeling has been extended in BMC Discovery 8.3 to retrieve information from QLogic cards in addition to Emulex. The methods have been improved so they should be able to retrieve information from other vendors' cards. These methods are supported on the following platforms:

• Linux (2.6 and 2.4 kernels)
• VMware ESX/ESXi
• Oracle Solaris
• IBM AIX
• Microsoft Windows

In BMC Discovery versions 9.0 SP1 and later, HBA modelling has been extended for the HP-UX platform and retrieves information from Emulex, QLogic, and HP Tachyon cards.

HBA discovery limitations

HBA discovery is not possible on older kernels (pre-Linux kernel 2.4) which do not support the sys pseudo file system. The sys pseudo file system is the only generic technique available.

On VMware ESX/ESXi systems, the proc pseudo filesystem can be used to determine some of the properties of the HBA drivers. Access to proc is only available when discovering VMware ESX/ESXi hosts by using ssh.

On older non-VMware ESX/ESXi kernels, only Emulex HBAs can be discovered because the tools required for discovery are installed along with the driver. Privileged credentials are required to use these tools.

Generally, an HBA card cannot be discovered unless:

• There is generic OS support (2.5 and later Linux kernels).
• Vendor tools are installed.

QLogic supplies a utility called scli, although as an optional installation item it cannot be relied on to be present.

Platform prerequisites

The following commands and packages are used to discover HBA cards on target systems. If none are available for a given system, HBA cards will not be discovered.

• Microsoft Windows
  • Microsoft fcinfo.exe
  • Emulex HBAnyware
  • Emulex LPUTIL.exe

• Oracle Solaris

  • emlxadm

  • fcinfo

  • hbacmd

  • lputil

• Linux

  • systool

  • hbacmd

  • lputil

• IBM AIX and HP-UX

  • lscfg

  • lslpp

To view a list of HBA interfaces

When an HBA card is discovered, the information is displayed on the host page in the user interface. An HBA interface row is divided into fields. The discovered HBA card ID and the firmware version that the card reported are displayed. This identifier string is set by the manufacturer to identify that particular version of the firmware.

The WWNN and WWPN columns display the World Wide Node Number and World Wide Port Number, respectively. A Fiber Channel target is assigned its WWNN at loop initialization time. It is possible for the WWNN to change between one loop initialization and the next. Every time the system boots or a target is added to or removed from the Fiber Channel, the loop is re-initialized.

The Connected To column displays the storage systems that the HBA is connected to. It is also a link to the corresponding Fibre Channel HBA page.

There are two possible configurations for HBA cards. You can have an HBA card with one node and two ports or you can have an HBA card with two nodes and one port each. The Emulex cards have two nodes and one port each.

1. Click any of the listed HBA cards.
   The Fiber Channel HBA page is displayed for that card.
2. From here, you can view any other related objects, view history, or destroy the object.

Related topics

• Viewing a host