vicfg-mpath output explained

[dingding]

i have a ESX 3.5U2.

1) output from vicfg-mpath

disk vmhba1:3:1 (716800MB) has 1 paths and policy of fixed

FC 2:1.0 2305843973626948526<->2377901567664876462 vmhba1:3:1 On active preferred

2) output from esxcfg-mpath

Disk vmhba1:3:1 /dev/sdi (716800MB) has 1 paths and policy of Fixed

FC 2:1.0 210000e08b826bae<->210000e08b82dbad vmhba1:3:1 On active preferred

the green text is easy understaned since it's the WWN, can someone explain the text in red?

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Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything.

[mike_laspina]

Hello

It is the WWN converted from Hex to Dec.

[dingding]

but why VMware do so, this decimal format is difficult to understand.

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Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything.

[BUGCHK]

It must be a bug in the output-routine (or an uneducated programmer, missing QA, ...) - I've been working with WWNs for 9+ years and never seen a decimal representation of a WWN until this moment!

[mike_laspina]

After examining the perl code it would appear to be a conversion issue and a little lazyness on the part of the developer.

Here is what the 2.5 API call returns

Name	Type	Description
nodeWorldWideName	xsd:long	The world wide node name for the adapter.
portType	FibreChannelPortType	The type of the fiber channel port.
portWorldWideName	xsd:long	The world wide port name for the adapter.
speed	xsd:long	The current operating speed of the adapter in bits per second.

notice the returned value is xsd:long

here is the code in the vicfg-mpath.pl script

printf(" %s %s %s %s %s %s\n",

$isFC ? "FC" : "Local",

$pciString,

$isFC ? $hba->nodeWorldWideName . "<->" . $hba->portWorldWideName : "",

$path->name,

$state,

(defined($polPrefer) && ($path->name eq $polPrefer)) ? "preferred" : "");

}

Notice the $hba->nodeWorldWaideName, this was converted when it was referenced and needed to be converted back to hex.

It's about 5 lines of code to do it.

So there you go, probably a time constraint issue.

[dingding]

really thanks, and what does another red text FC2:1.0 mean?

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Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything.

[casselc · Accepted solution]

It's a fibre channel HBA with a PCI bus ID of 2:1.0.

[mike_laspina]

Correct!

The FC X:X.X format is the PCI bus enumeration value for the Bus:Device.Function elements.

You can view this correlation using

lspci

on the esx 3 platform.

[dingding]

yes, i can see this in lspci.

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Idleness is not doing nothing. Idleness is being free to do anything.