Devices in WPARs

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Different types of devices are supported by the AIX® operating system, although the support of devices in the WPAR is limited to fiber-attached storage devices, fiber channel adapters, and virtual Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) disks.

Inactive WPAR

With an inactive WPAR, a storage device can be allocated and de-allocated to any number of WPARs. The first WPAR that starts takes ownership of the device, which means that device will be unconfigured in the global environment and reconfigured in the WPAR. You can not make any configuration changes on the device in the global environment when the device is in use by the WPAR. There are no restrictions on removing a device from an inactive WPAR.

Active WPAR

There are two ways that a device can be allocated to an active WPAR.
  • If a device is not in use by another WPAR, the cfgmgr command allocates the device to the WPAR and makes the device available for use in the WPAR.
  • If a device is in use by another WPAR, it is added to the WPAR file configuration. This device is not made accessible to the WPAR because it is already in use by another WPAR.

When an active WPAR has control of a device, the device is in the defined state in the global environment. No configuration operations are allowed on the device as long as it is in the global environment. Commands such as mkdev, chdev, rmdev, and cfgmgr will not work on the device. In order for the global environment to take control of the device, it has to be deallocated from the WPAR that has control over it.

Supported storage devices

The disk drives that are supported in a WPAR include any Fibre Channel disk drive that is supported by AIX Version 7.1 and uses the scsidisk device driver with the AIX Multiple Path I/O (MPIO) (default PCM) multipath software. These include the following storage systems:
  • IBM® System Storage® DS3400
  • IBM System Storage DS4200
  • IBM TotalStorage™ DS4300 (FAStT600)
  • IBM TotalStorage DS4500 (FAStT900)
  • IBM System Storage DS4700
  • IBM System Storage DS4800
  • IBM System Storage DS5100
  • IBM System Storage DS5300
  • IBM XIV® Storage System

The tape drives that are supported in a WPAR are any Fibre Channel tape drives that are supported by AIX Version 7.1 and use the sctape device driver.

Note: The atape device driver is not supported.

WPAR storage device limitations

The following limitations apply to WPAR storage devices.
  • A storage device can be exported to only one active WPAR.
  • The JFS2 file system must be used for disk storage devices.
  • To use the WPAR storage device feature, the wio.common and wio.fcp packages must be installed.
  • WPARs with storage devices are not supported in non-root user environment.