recover VMs on bl860 with HP VCnet+VC4FC onto a rx7640 ?

[Steve Lewis]

What are the issues and potential pitfalls when trying to recover a blade server running HP-UX11iv3 with Integrity Virtual Machines, networking and storage presented thru Virtual Connect modules.

The current target node is a physical rx7640 with 4 physical interfaces for storage and network.

We will map the storage over from a mirrored SAN disk array.  As long as the LUNs have the same names I don't see any issue - or are there any?

firmware differences?

not the same HBAs?

Anything else?

P.S.This thread has been moved from HP-UX >General to HP-UX >  virtualization- HP Forums Moderator

[Dave Olker]

Hi Steve,

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by "recover a blade server" to an rx7640.  Are you wanting to take the boot disk from the blade and boot it on the rx7640?  Or are you wanting to simply move the VMs running on the blade over to the rx7640? 

Which version of Integrity VM are you using?  Which version/Fusion of HP-UX are you running on both boxes?  Which version/Fusion of HP-UX are you running inside the VMs?

If you want to simply move/migrate the VMs over to the rx7640 I'd suggest doing a VM migration. In this case it would likely be an offline migration because the CPU families are different.  However, doing an offline migration will allow hpvmmigrate to do the disk mapping and network mapping for you.  You should find out pretty quickly if the VM migration will succeed or fail based on the pre-migration checks performed by hpvmmigrate.

The blade and rx7640 would need to have connectivity to the same physical networks and the virtual switches on both systems would need to use the same name.  As for storage, both physical servers would need to see whichever disks you're using for the VMs, so if this is SAN-based (which it would have to be if you're going to migrate VMs) then make sure the LUNs are mapped to both physical servers.

Hope this helps,

Dave

[Steve Lewis]

Thanks Dave,

All storage is on SAN (including boot).  The same LUNs will be presented to both servers through mirrored disk arrays about 30 miles apart.

The question is more about whether it would be possible to do a full offline disaster recovery (ignite followed by Tivoli TSM restore) of a blade server running HP-UX 1iv3 VS-OE with latest patches and VC4FC+VC/flex-10, to a rx7640 (different/older model of Itanium but with more cores and memory).

The key question is... will the Ignite boot/install work if there is no VC hardware in the rx7640.  It only has physical cards for network and storage.

We will need an Ignite server with base image at the DR site.

[Steve Lewis]

Has anyone else got any ideas about disaster recovery of a blade server using VC onto a non-blade server?