Have folks booted AIX to EMC DMX-3000 arrays?  So
far I've only set up Solaris and maintained AIX
that was already installed when I arrived.

I have some AIX 5.1 boxes that currently boot to an
old EMC Symm5, so I think all of the rev levels are
high enough.  The DMX is at least newer levels.
The Symm5 is being decommsioned.  I have moved all
of the non-boot data to the new storage and that
worked great.

Right now I have rootvg mirrored to both the old
array and the new array, so if there are any
problems at least I can boot to the old mirror and
not need a NIM restore.  Right now I have the
bootlist set to the new then the old, so if the new
fails it will fall back to the old.  The servers
run an important application so even though they
are QA and Dev not Prod I still need to go through
change control to get a reboot scheduled.  Not much
room for poking around and experimenting.

# ipl_varyon -i
Gives a YES for both the old and new devices.  At
least I've set up the boot block and the / filesystem
and so on correctly.  It thinks I can boot to the
new.

# bootinfo -B
Gives a 0 (NO) for the new devices and a 1 (YES)
for the old devices.  It is supposed to check all
of the firmware levels and such to confirm that
it will work.  But bootinfo is an old utility
from AIX 4.x.

I am NOT happy that the two tools give different
answers.  It turns on my paranoia bit.

I'm off site working remotely, so I am not positive
that I will be able to watch the console while it
boots.  Thus I won't know for certain if the new
device worked or if it retried on the old.

My questions:

1) Once AIX is booted, is there a why to tell which
side of the the mirror it started out on?  The
list of boot devices is handled before the boot disk
is mounted so it can't be stored on disk as it
happens.

2) Is bootinfo irrelevant because of its age?
Shoudl I just take the word of ipl_varyon because it
is the newer tool?

3) I've done previous AIX migrations using migratepv
to relocate rather than mirroring rootvg.  It works
to boot to one mirror, right?  Kinda defeat the
purpose of mirroring otherwise.  I've mirrored
across plenty of internal drives just not across one
EMC array to another.

Thanks in advance!

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It appears to vary by hosts.  So far out of 2 hosts I have
one where bootinfo -B claims the DMX devices won't work
and one that claims they will work.  Will schedule the
reboot of the easy one.
What sort of patch levels and such should I look for?

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