HP-UX vPars 6.0 N-Port ID Virtualization (NPIV) - A brief overview

Virtual World Wide Name management

Using GUID Manager to automatically allocate IDs

HP recommends using the GUID Manager product (GUIDMgr), which is included with vPars 6.0, and allowing it to

handle WWNs for you automatically. The GUIDMgr provides a mechanism to manage unique WWNs so that the

same ID is not reallocated until freed, to avoid the possibility of data corruption that arises when the same LUNs are

presented to multiple vPars by mistake. GUIDMgr is integrated with HP-UX vPars 6.0 such that once it is configured,

administrators may use the commands that they are familiar with (vparcreate and vparmodify) to interact with

GUIDMgr automatically.

The GUIDMgr product relies on a client or server architecture, and one GUID database server (this is the same as the

GUIDMgr server) can support multiple VSPs. It is also possible to have multiple GUIDMgr servers, but it is strongly

recommended that each GUID DB server be configured with its own subset of WWN range that HP has reserved for

GUIDMgr use. Each server may manage up to 100 unique ranges of WWNs, and each range of WWNs may

contain up to 32,000 entries.

Additionally, you should bear the following requirements in mind:

1. All WWNs on a single SAN must be unique.

2. All VSPs in a “migration cluster” (a group of servers that virtual machines and virtual partitions can migrate

between) must be on the same SAN and should use the same GUIDMgr server.

The range that HP has reserved for NPIV is 0x50014c2000000000 to 0x50014c27ffffffff for Port WWNs and

0x50014c2800000000 to 0x50014c2fffffffff for Node WWNs.

For more information about installing, configuring and using GUIDMgr, please see the HP-UX GUID Manager

Administrator Guide and the GUIDMgr man pages: guid_client_prepare(1M), guidconfig(1M), guidd(1M),

guiddbutil(1M), guidkeyd(1M), guidmerge(1M), guidmgmt(1M), and guidrecovery(1M).

Allocating IDs manually or with third-party products

When manually configuring vHBAs, vWWNs may safely be picked from the range 0x100000110a0300 -

0x100000110a030fff. This is a total of 4096 WWN which are not in the range that is handled automatically by

GUIDMgr (see above). A user may use GUIDMgr for some NPIV HBAs and still manually select from the above range

for other vHBAs. If this is being done, please note that you can save your manual settings in the GUIDMgr for tracking

purposes, but the GUIDMgr never assigns a WWN outside of the range that HP has reserved.