Monday, May 21, 2007

Unix Days - Gdansk 2007

Next week there's going to be 3rd edition of Unix Days conference in Poland. We've just opened up public registration. Last year we had to close public registration before even 24h lasted as there're only little above 200 seats available - not all people attend all days and all lectures so we can allow about 300 people to register. We were very happy with last two editions (and thanks to questionnaires we know you were too) and we hope this one will be even better. This year we decided to extend the conference to 3 days comparing to two days last time. This means more presentations to attend. This is also a great opportunity for sys admins to know each other better in real life - especially during evening party to all who attended the conference.

See you there!

UPDATE:

The conference went well - over 260 people were there - good. You can find presentations here - some of them are in English.

Wednesday, May 09, 2007

NPort ID Virtualization

Aaron wrote:

What do I do all day at the office? Lately, I've been working on adding NPort ID Virtualization (NPIV) to our Leadville FibreChannel stack.

At a high level, you can think of NPIV as allowing one physical FibreChannel HBA to log in multiple times to the SAN, and so you have many virtual HBAs.

Why is this interesting?

The first thing I thought of when I heard about this is hypervisor applications, like Xen. If you have one world wide name per DOMU (in Xen terminology), you can do the same zoning/lun masking that you've always done per server, but this times it's per DOMU.

Another use is that if your HBA breaks, and you have to replace it, you can use the old WWN on the new HBA, and you won't have to rezone your SAN.



More details on NPIV.