Rob's Blog

Installing the IBM RDAC driver for Hyper-V R2 Beta Server

A quick disclaimer: this should work for the entire IBM DS3xxx series, but I’ve only tested with the DS3300. Your Mileage May Vary!

So I’ve decided to have a go with some pre-release software and use Hyper-V R2 server. I work with several clients who rely on Windows Server 2008 Enterprise using Hyper-V in a clustered manner and either Enterprise R2 or Hyper-V R2 sound perfect for them. Cluster Shared Volumes are a brilliant idea and bring Hyper-V much closer to VMware for management ease. Specifically on my SAN I’m using IBM’s DS3300 iSCSI platform so to try this out I went about trying to get the RDAC MPIO drivers installed on the Hyper-V R2 beta.

Unfortunately, things aren’t that straightforward. The Hyper-V R2 beta does not come with a WOW32 layer, which means that IBM’s installer will not run. So, we have to do a bit of a kludge to get it working.

So first off, let’s download everything we need. In fact, the only thing we need to download is the IBM Storage Manager software. Get this downloaded – on another Windows 2008 x64 server – whilst we’re doing a quick bit of work on the Hyper-V R2 box.

In the meantime, let’s get things prepared on our Hyper-V R2 box. first off, let’s make sure the MPIO service is installed. Simple as; just execute:

start /w ocsetup MultipathIO

Right, back to your management computer. First off extract the IBM zip file somewhere, then run the installation package. Go ahead and choose the correct language and then, when you get to this screen:

Stop! Don’t touch anything else. We need to copy the files from this installation to our Hyper-V server. So, start up Task Manager and on the front panel, find the IBM installation program and choose "Go To Process".

Next up, still in Task Manager you’ll see that a process called javaw.exe *32 is highlighted.

Ok, you’ve now been taken to a folder in your SystemDrive\Users\Username\AppData\Temp folder. Navigate up a few levels so you’re in the root folder here (on my PC it was named I1238062423 but I’m pretty sure this is a random folder name) and then navigate so that you are in the folder:

SystemDrive\Users\UserName\AppData\Local\Temp\temp folder name\InstallerData\Disk1\InstData\Resource1\$BASE_DIR$\Resources\Platforms\WSX86

Great! You should now see a few folders in here, one of which should be called mpio. Grab this folder and copy it to your Hyper-V R2 machine. I was really inventive and copied it to C:\IBM\MPIO

Ok, so now back to the Hyper-V R2 server. Go to the command prompt that’s opened here, and cd to the MPIO directory you’ve created. Installing the drivers is a cinch; just run the following command:

C:\IBM\mpio>rdacinstall -i mpio -b c:\ibm\mpio\ds4utm.inf -d c:\ibm\mpio\ds4utm.inf -m c:\ibm\mpio\ds4dsm.inf

N.B. on this webpage this command may scroll across two lines. Make sure you type it all on a single command prompt line!

At this stage, you’ll have to reboot your machine. I have done this twice now; once it didn’t require a reboot but the second time it did. Do it now just to be safe; you don’t want to be halfway through configuring stuff when you realise you need a reboot.

So, your system now has the IBM RDAC drivers installed. Great! Let’s use them. Launch the new iSCSI panel by running iscsicpl – thanks to Ben Armstrong for this tip! Anyone who’s used Hyper-V R1 or Server 2008 Core to try and connect to iSCSI knows how much of a godsend this is. Log on to your IBM DS3300 targets and your disks are connected!

Let’s just have a quick verify. Run the following code on both your Hyper-V R2 machine and your managing workstation:

netsh advfirewall firewall set rule group="Remote Volume Management" new enable=yes

N.B. sometimes when copying and pasting this doesn’t work – issues between character encoding and the command prompt interpreting your text. If this comes up with some weird error, type it in by hand – it works, trust me.

So there you have it! Your Hyper-V R2 Beta server is connected to your DS3300, fully utilising MPIO. Great!

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 26th, 2009 at 10:48 am and is filed under Hyper-V R2 Server. Find similar posts by selecting any of the following tags: hyper-v, iscsi, rdac, server core. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.