XIV HAK Version 1.6 has been released

I recently created a post about the XIV Host Attachment Kit (amusingly called the HAK). IBM has released an update to the HAK, taking us from version 1.5 to version 1.6. The updated versions, along with release notes and installation instructions can be found at the following links:

Whats changed you asked? Great question! Checking the Release Notes for each Operating System (which can be found in the links above), I found some common improvements to the HAK for every OS:

The xiv_diag command now provides the HAK version number when used with the –version argument. This is handy to confirm what version of HAK you are currently running.
More information is collected with the xiv_diag command.
The xiv_devlist command can now display LUN sizes in different capacity units, by using the –u or –size-unit argument. I give an example below.
Usage: -u SIZE_UNIT, –size-unit=SIZE_UNIT
Valid SIZE_UNIT values: MB, GB, TB, MiB, GiB, TiB
The xiv_devlist output can be saved to a file in CSV or XML format, by adding the –f or –file argument. I give an example below.

There are also several other fixes which are mainly common between Operating Systems. Given that a major part of the HAK are Python scripts such as xiv_attach, xiv_devlist and xiv_diag and given that the output and behaviors of these script are very similar for each OS, this is not surprising.

I installed the new version 1.6 HAK onto my 64-bit Windows 2008 server and found another pleasant surprise: When I ran the xiv_attach command it detected that my Qlogic driver was downlevel. In this example it detected I am running a Qlogic QLE2462 on driver version 9.18.25 and suggested I should instead run driver version 9.19.25.

I then tried out the xiv_devlist command, displaying volume sizes in both decimal (GB) and binary (GiB). Note the syntax I used to get the GiB output: xiv_devlist -u GiB

Finally I offloaded the output of the xiv_devlist command to a CSV file. Again please note the syntax as you may find it useful:

xiv_devlist -t csv -f devlist.csv -u GiB

You could use -t xml instead of getting CSV output. Clearly you could also change the file name devlist.csv to any filename you like.

Other considerations?

You do not need to worry about which version of firmware your XIV is running. The release notes confirm HAK version 1.6 will work with XIV firmware 10.1.0, 10.2.0, 10.2.2, 10.2.4 and 10.2.4a, which should cover pretty well every machine in the world.

One final note: Under Known Limitations the release notes state that you should not map a LUN0 volume. This simply means leaving LUN0 disabled (which is the default). In the example below I start mapping volumes from LUN1 and have NOT clicked to enable mapping of volumes to LUN0. This should be the norm.

Any confusion or questions? You know where to find me.