Forum Discussion

TALIS2's avatar
TALIS2
Level 2
11 years ago

Share Filesystems between SCO Openserver and AIX with SF V6

Hello,

I would like to share FS between SCO Openserver v6 and AIX (+ Basic Storage Foundation V6.0.3). I created some filesytems on SCO Openserver and maps this LUN to a AIX servers (using SAN capabilities). The servers didn't share the same LUN in the sametime.

# lspv

....

hdisk18         none                                None

# vxdisk scandisks

# vxdisk -e list

DEVICE       TYPE           DISK        GROUP        STATUS               OS_NATIVE_NAME   ATTR

....

san_vc1_9    auto:none      -            -           online invalid       hdisk18          -

 

The disk is online but invalid. I suppose that VxFS on SCO Openserver is not compatible with SF 6. But is it true ? and is there a way to solve that ?

Thanks.

AIX
business continuity
Compatibility
Storage Foundation
  • mikebounds's avatar
    mikebounds
    11 years ago

     

    There are at least 3 issues to overcome:
    1. Logical Volume Management / Paritions
      SCO uses divvy and AIX will use Veritas Volume Manager or AIX LVM and these are not compatible.
       
    2. Filesystem:
      SCO uses AFS and AIX will use vxfs or jfs.  You could possibly overcome this if you could find a common filesystem between the two.
       
    3. Endianess:
      SCO probably uses little Endian for its filesystem and AIX probably uses big Endian and this being the case, you would have to convert from one to the other, even if you could overcome the above 2 issues.

    So to umount a filesystem in SCO and mount it on AIX is very difficult and probably impossible, so you should use NFS

    Mike

     
  • Gaurav_S's avatar
    Gaurav_S
    Moderator
    11 years ago

    Hi,

    you have created filesystem on SCO but SCO is not having veritas installed... An "online invalid" disk means disk is not intialized in Veritas

    As SCO is not a supporting operating system for veritas volume manager, you can't initialize a disk on SCO, rather, you will need to intialize disk in AIX server which will defy the purpose of what you are trying to do, better solution to that would be to procure a new LUN into AIX server directly. Once you issue a "vxdisksetup -i hdiskxxx"  , disk will be initialized & brought online in Veritas volume manager.

    Once disk is initialized, you will need to put that disk in a diskgroup & then cut veritas volumes.

    If the above mentioned disk is coming from SCO to AIX & the disk already has some data in it, if you issue a "vxdisksetup" command on AIX, you may be loosing the data as "vxdisksetup" will write the private & public region.

     

    G

     

     

  • mikebounds's avatar
    mikebounds
    Level 6
    11 years ago

     

    There are at least 3 issues to overcome:
    1. Logical Volume Management / Paritions
      SCO uses divvy and AIX will use Veritas Volume Manager or AIX LVM and these are not compatible.
       
    2. Filesystem:
      SCO uses AFS and AIX will use vxfs or jfs.  You could possibly overcome this if you could find a common filesystem between the two.
       
    3. Endianess:
      SCO probably uses little Endian for its filesystem and AIX probably uses big Endian and this being the case, you would have to convert from one to the other, even if you could overcome the above 2 issues.

    So to umount a filesystem in SCO and mount it on AIX is very difficult and probably impossible, so you should use NFS

    Mike

     
  • TALIS2's avatar
    TALIS2
    Level 2
    11 years ago

    Hi,

    Thanks you for your answers. That confirms what I thought.

    The best way is to use NFS between SCO and AIX.

    Thierry.

  • Marianne's avatar
    Marianne
    Level 6
    11 years ago

    I agree with Mike - the only way to share filesystem between SCO and AIX is via NFS. 

    You need to check each OS for NFS version support.

    I have marked Mike's post as solution.