EMC to NetApp Solaris FCP migration – Recovery When EMC Breaks the box
So, I have been working on an EMC to Netapp migration project, and the customer is entirely Solaris 10 on their Oracle DB environment. (They want to change, sadly they cannot at this time.)
Dealing with migrations between vendors can be difficult. In EMC’s world, we have POWERPATH, which is a pile of suck when you have to work with SAN vendors on the same box who want to rightly use MPXIO (Native multipathing). I hate 3rd party addins for things like Multipathing. This is 2014, the crap is built in!
Well, what happens when you switch a box from POWERPATH to Native multipathing with MPXIO? All the power path stuff goes mad and it can’t find any of it. That is for another blog power, not this one.
What about when the migration is done, and you want to remove POWERPATH from the server? Well it’ll kernel panic the box, it’ll corrupt the boot archive, and you will be in a reboot loop. Dead in the water, thanks to EMC.
This post isn’t just about migrating to NetApp, it’ll help anyone who tried to uninstall PowerPath on solaris, and got corrupted system files from it, and how to rebuild the BOOT ARCHIVE.
