Active WWPN of Virtual Fiber Channel Adapter

Answer

NPIV is a standard technology for Fibre Channel networks that enables you to connect multiple logical partitions to one physical port of a physical Fibre Channel adapter.

Each Virtual Fibre Channel adapter on the Virtual I/O Server connects to one virtual Fibre Channel adapter on a client logical partition.

Each Virtual Fibre Channel adapter on each client logical partition receives a pair of unique WWPNs.

The client logical partition uses one WWPN to log into the SAN at any given time.
The other WWPN is used when you move the client logical partition to another managed system (with Live Partition Mobility).

AIX is Designed such as lscfg will always reference the first WWPN of the Pair created thru HMC or IVM.

This first wwpn is not necessarly the current active one ( depending if a Live Partition Mobility was done)

In the below example, the following pair has been used to illustrate this Design :

c0507603bab9004e,c0507603bab9004f

This pair has been retrieved from command :

HMC> lshwres -r virtualio --rsubtype fc -m <MS> --level lpar -F lpar_id,slot_num,wwpns

where MS is the Managed System provided by "lssyscfg -r sys -F name"





On AIX LPAR, lscfg -vl fcs# will show only the first WWPN listed by lshwres




While fcstat fcs# will show the active WWPN (which could match to lscfg report).



Both of them are showing only 1 WWPN but fcstat will show always the WWPN which is in use


NOTE: If lsyscfg & fcstat do not report the same WWPN that means Live Partition Mobility has been executed on this LPAR