AIX VIO SCSI-2 Reservation causing SC_DISK_ERR7

[Richard Siemers]

Resolved an incident today where a new AIX 6.1 VIO install had an issue with one virtual LPAR that for some reason did not multipath its LUN0 (rootvg) boot drive properly, it was putting a SCSI-2 reserve on the LUN that locked out MPIO from accessing it on the other available paths.

lspath showed all paths up, however the errrpt was spamming SC_DISK_ERR7 messages every minute complaining of path down.

I could see a SCSI-2 reserve lock with the IMC gui, but did not have an option to clear it. Since the box was offline anyway, I deleted the VLUN templates and re-exported, then refreshed the GUI and the reservation appeared to go away, but when the system booted up, the reservation was back.

While the exact cause inside AIX is still unknown, using the 3PAR CLI while the AIX vm was online to clear the reservation, and then re-run cfgmgr seems to have fixed it. The system has been rebooted twice and the lock as well as the errors have not returned.

The commands we used from the 3PAR cli were showrsv to show the reservations and "setvv -clrrsv vvname" to clear it.