This summer we have been migrating a bunch of data to our shiny new InfoTrend EonStor A12F-G2221. With 1G battery backed cache, it’s a screaming box of disk, and it looks cool to boot. There is a gotcha though if you want to direct connect it to QLogic QLA2340 card on a REL 3 server. Here is what you have to do.
First, get the new driver from QLogic, or install the one that came on CD with the HBA. The one that Red Hat packages is always old and useless, and one that QLogic provides is better anyways because the installer rebuilds the rdimage for you. Once you get the package just “cd” into the “qlafc-linux-X.XX.XX-X-install” and run “qlinstall”. This will install it all for you, so let it do it’s thing, and reboot the system when it’s done.
Now, go into the management console for your EonStor A12F-G2221. For the most part, the system defaults should work, but InfoTrend sets the default Fibre Connection to “Loop Only”. This is fine if you are dealing with a san, but since we are trying to do a direct connect, we have to change it to either “Auto” or “Direct Connect”. I suggest “Auto”, since that way you can have the other port connected to a loop if you want.
That should be all you have to do. You will have to reboot the controller for the change to take effect, so make sure you do this during a scheduled downtime if you have the disk in production.
