Originally posted by: Wouter Liefting
If you use vSCSI, the SAN disks are assigned to the VIO (more technically, to the burned-in WWPN associated with the Fibre Channel Adapters that are assigned to the VIO). As such, you can see them as regular hdisks with commands such as lsdev. The mapping from the physical device to the virtual SCSI server adapter can be viewed with lsmap -all.
If you use vFC (NPIV), then unfortunately you will not be able to view the SAN disks on the VIO server. After all, they are not assigned to the VIO server, but directly to the WWPN of the client LPAR (or more correctly, to the WWPNs associated with the vFC adapters that are assigned to the client LPAR). The only thing you can normally see is the mapping between the physical FC adapter and the virtual FC adapters: lsmap -all -npiv.
There is a trick I've been thinking about that may or may not work - I have not tested it to the full extent. For testing purposes it is possible to login to the SAN on the VIO server, but using the WWPNs of the vFC client adapter (of the client LPAR). This is hidden relatively deep in the HMC screens. If you are logged in this way (which obviously you should only do when the client LPAR is down), you might be able to see the hdisks if you do a cfgmgr. But once again, I have not really tested this. It may or may not work. In any case, don't forget to rmdev the hdisks from the VIO server, and logout the vFC adapters, before you start the client LPAR.