Fibre Channel HBAs

Fibre Channel HBAs are essentially SCSI controllers that have functionality to encapsulate scsi commands and data into fibre channel packets and transport them serially over copper or fiber cables. Most HBAs can function attached to an arbitrated loop or a fibre channel fabric or in point to point mode attached directly to an array. They come with both 1Gb/sec and 2Gb/sec capabilities with 1, 2 and in some cases 4 ports running at 1 or 2Gb/sec.

JNI HBAs

JNI supplies HBAs for multiple platforms and in multiple versions. JNI offers SBUS and PCI HBAs both 1G ang 2G versions. It isn't really worthwhile buying a 2Gb/sec card for an SBUS machine because the 25MHZ SBUS really can't drive the 2Gb card beyond 1Gb. The cards are supplied with driver packages which come with a kernel driver and configuration file and a java tool to ease administration of the driver. The tool is called EazyFibre and is installed in /opt.

The newer versions of the driver are called "no reboot" drivers and allow true dynamic configuration. In the past adding disks to a Sun box required a reboot. You could work around this limitation by pre-populating /kernel/drv/sd.conf with entries for LUNs that you may want to add in the future but true dynamic configuration is likely more efficient and convenient and wouldn't limit you to using pre-populated LUN assignments.

The HBA's typically can operate in Fabric or arbitrated loop mode and this can be configured via the configuration file or via EazyFibre.

Here are sample jnic.conf and jnic146x.conf configuration files.

Note - This line from jnic.conf, "jnic5-FailoverDelay=0;", is a per instance failover delay setting for jnic5. This is the default for all per instance failover delay settings and must be changed in order for LUNs to failover to another HBA. For single path devices this should be fine but for multipath devices where failover is desired as with disks set this to "jnic5-FailoverDelay=30;".

QLogic HBAs

QLogic also offers a variety of HBA's for several hardware/OS platforms. QLogic HBAs both Fibre Channel and SCSI have been used on Sun servers for years.

QLogic offers a suite of management tools to help manage and configure their HBAs.

Here is a sample qla2300.conf configuration file.

Emulex HBAs

Emulex offers a variety of HBA's for several hardware/OS platforms. Their LightPulse HBA's have been very popular with Windows OS users but maybe a little less so with Unix systems. The PCI versions for Unix have been pretty good performers however the SBUS versions have been reported to have performance issues compared with JNI and QLogic SBUS cards.

Emulex provides a gui tool callde HBAnywhere and a command line tool called lputil that may be used to configure the cards. The cards may also be configured by manually editing the /kernel/drv/lpfc.conf file and rebooting.

Here is a sample lpfc.conf configuration file.