IBM TS7530 engine failover and HBA mode

Well, when they delivered the VTL about four weeks ago, nobody figured this thing would be such a mess. Apparently IBM hasn’t set up that much VTL’s with engine failover.

Point being, the VE’s have eight HBA ports (four inside, four outside the black box). Now, as they configured the VTL, the ports were all in initiator mode. And we needed the fourth port in target mode as well, as it’s better to have 4 independent paths to the VTL. The only problem was, the VE console didn’t think so.

There is no way in hell you can switch the darn HBA port to the target mode. — Well, IBM just called and told us the solution.

Disolve the Failover group, reconfigure the HBA port and then recreate the Failover group. Tada …..