topic Re: HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system? in Operating System - HP-UX

HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system?

marie-noelle jeanson — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 21:14:46 GMT

HP would like to hear from you on this question:
Do you happen to have multiple boot disks on your systems that you would use to boot different OS versions? In other words, do you happen to boot a system from a given disk using a given OS (for instance, HP-UX 11.0) and boot from onother disk (for instance, HP-UX 11i v2)?
Would you need this type of environment in test environment only or any reason why you would need such an environment on production systems too?

THANKS!

Marie.

Re: HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system?

Patrick Wallek — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 21:38:43 GMT

I do not currently do this, but it could definitely come in handy in a test environment.

If a new release comes out it would be nice to install it on a separate disk from previous versions and be able to test. Then, if need be, boot back to previous version of the OS for troubleshooting production issues.

I don't see much of a benefit, in my environment, to booting multiple versions of an OS in production though.

Re: HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system?

A. Clay Stephenson — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 22:45:21 GMT

I certainly do this in my sandbox environment though not in test. I always use a three-tiered deployment: sandbox, test, and production. I currently am able to boot 3 OS versions on my sandboxes. I can't see the need for this in a production environment. I think the question behind the question has to do with virtual boot disks.

Re: HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system?

Hein van den Heuvel — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 01:06:48 GMT

I do, booting either OpenVMS or HPUX on my rx2620 depending on the customer(s) I am working with. Development and test only. No production.

Some day I hope to snarf a Montecito version and run virtual machines to make this whole process more comfortable, always keeping an hpux host in the air, and allocating resources between multiple os'es and/or version of those os'es as needed.
Specifially I want to be able to run more true client-server tests, cross OS, withing my single system.

Btw... my box has 3 drives. I have hpux on 1, opemvms on an other and the 3rd is an hpux data drive. With lvm I carved a up half of those drives (the first half on one, the second hald on the other) and actually use them as data space for OpenVMS. I treat those volumes as 'partitions'. OpenVMS allows me to use a 'virtual disk' driver to present a range of blocks on a spindle as a seperate drive. Not much safety in this setup, but it fills my need. I can test with 3 drives under OpenVMS, with 2 under ux.

Cheers,
Hein.

Re: HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system?

Yogeeraj_1 — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 01:43:27 GMT

Hi Marie,

> Do you happen to have multiple boot disks on your systems that you would use to boot different OS versions? In other words, do you happen to boot a system from a given disk using a given OS (for instance, HP-UX 11.0) and boot from onother disk (for instance, HP-UX 11i v2)?
Currently no. we are running hp-ux 11.11. If we upgrade to a higher version, we will most probably do so during our test phase. Unfortunately, since server resources are quite expensive in this region, we cannot keep such a configuration for a long period of time.

> Would you need this type of environment in test environment only or any reason why you would need such an environment on production systems too?
This definitely something very useful. However, as mentioned above, to make efficient use of resources, our test environment are sometimes also used to shared production load.

We would not really need it on the production systems because we would not like to interfere with the availability of systems. Also since we have several servers, such a setup would exists on only one of them.

hope this helps!

kind regards
yogeeraj

Re: HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system?

Luk Vandenbussche — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 01:50:56 GMT

Hi,

We have an rx2620 with the following config

Disk 1 - Partition 1 : W2K3
Disk 1 - Partition 2 : Suse Linux
Disk 2 - Partition 1 : HPUX 11.23

It is used as a test environment.

Re: HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system?

Andrew Merritt_2 — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 09:54:34 GMT

I have a test rx2620 which has:

HP-UX 11.23
RedHat Linux (RHEL4 and RHEL3)
SuSe Linux (SLES 9)

boot disks on it. I can't think of a situation other than providing test environments where you'd want to do this.

Of course, on cell based systems you can run multiple partitions, each with a different OS at the same time. On single celled systems, you can do something similar with virtual machines, in some cases (e.g. Linux under Windows, and vice versa.)

Andrew

Re: HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system?

Jeff_Traigle — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 10:05:38 GMT

I've never done this anywhere I've worked, but it could be a benefit for testing in some cases. The only reason I can dream up to do this in a production environment is as a fallback to an OS upgrade rollout since a simple reboot would be a lot quicker than using Ignite.

Re: HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system?

Pete Randall — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 10:06:20 GMT

Marie,

At this point I do not do this, but I have in the past, installing a new OS on a separate boot disk for testing purposes and keeping the prior OS available for fall-back or production. A very handy technique.

Pete

Re: HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system?

Heironimus — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 10:29:03 GMT

We don't do this on a regular basis, but we do keep a spare drive in the machine we use for our internal testing. We have a pretty homogenous environment so the spare drive is normally just the master for our Ignite golden image. If we need to do testing we can swap that drive for a spare and install whatever we need.

We can't upgrade HP-UX right now because of application compatibility, but if we could we'd probably reload that machine first on to new drives and keep the existing OS drives to swap in for testing.

Re: HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system?

H.Merijn Brand (procura — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 10:39:00 GMT

No, I would not.

To be honoust, not even on PC's.

If you want dual boot PC's, my advice would be to use Linux or any other stable *ux OS that supports your VM machine of choice, and run the second(ary) OS in VMware (or the alternative VM machine of choice) on the stable box.

In my work environment, I only have Win2k available on a VMware running on SuSE 10.1 Linux. I never regretted that move. Machine is now up for an avarage of two consequetive months. That used to be 6 days max.

The thing I love about HP-UX is it's stability. Uptime of over a year for 11.00 is quite normal these days.

For small target boxes and test environments, Virtualization is the future if you'd ask me.

Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn

Re: HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system?

James R. Ferguson — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 10:45:10 GMT

Hi Marie:

I don't have multiple boot disks that I would use to boot different OS versions.

I would agree with Andrew Merritt. For servers dedicated to developement or quality assurance testing the mechanics are useful. I can't see the need in pure production environments.

Virtual machines seem closer to modern needs. I make my Windows workstation much more useful by running Linux under EMC VMware coincident with Windows.

Regards!

...JRF...

Re: HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system?

John Payne_2 — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 12:23:23 GMT

I don't do this.

I have 8 different Golden Images I use. (Ignite) Every machine I have is a child of one of these images. I have a machine to update these images (or build new ones, as the case may require), which I may install over and over and over, but there is no need for dual boot OS.

A machine is there to serve out it's term with the image it has, when that term is over for whatever reason, we either get rid of the machine, or reinstall it with a different image.

Hope it helps
John

Re: HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system?

Geoff Wild — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 12:34:06 GMT

No - we don't do that.

We may exploit that scenario once we move to VSE on Itanium - but just have different Virtual Servers with different OS levels (11iv2, 11iv3, different patch levels,)

Rgds...Geoff

Re: HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system?

Hemmetter — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 12:42:55 GMT

hello Marie,

we do have one N4000 System with such a multiboot, used for software compatibility tests.
We can boot into HP-UX 11.0, 11i and 11i V2.

Its a pure test environment.

rgds
HGH

Re: HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system?

Olivier Masse — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 20:57:19 GMT

Marie NoÃ«lle,

I've never done that, and if I ever needed to have different OS revisions in the future for tests or development purposes, I agree with others here who would rather use integrity virtual machines for this purpose.

Thanks

Re: HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system?

Samir Pujara_1 — Wed, 13 Dec 2006 23:10:26 GMT

Hi Marie,

>>Do you happen to have multiple boot disks on your systems that you would use to boot different OS versions? In other words, do you happen to boot a system from a given disk using a given OS (for instance, HP-UX 11.0) and boot from onother disk (for instance, HP-UX 11i v2)?

Till now I have not done so, but its quit interesting to have such setup in development box.

>>Would you need this type of environment in test environment only or any reason why you would need such an environment on production systems too?

Yes, would like to test it in dev setup and the reason is - I can use same h/w for testing my apps in two different version of o/s. Also it will be very helpful in case of upgradation of o/s.

Suggestion: Any documentation available on this?

Samir

Re: HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system?

dirk dierickx — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 01:53:33 GMT

we don't have or use that kind of scheme here.

Re: HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system?

Karsten Löperick — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 04:22:08 GMT

Hello Marie-Noelle,

I am also not using dual or more OS booting options here. Because I support a more or less pure HP-UX environment. So there is no need for that. On the other hand I do also some checks with Linux. My ( meanwhile ) prefered solution are a VMWare system. That gives me enough flexibility. And as some of the forum members said: the advantage of HP-UX are the stability. So I do not see any necessarity to have multi OS on same system in production environment.

Greetings

Karsten

Re: HP Poll (points rewards): Do you boot different OSes on a same system?

Peter Nikitka — Thu, 14 Dec 2006 05:47:51 GMT

Hi,

I used this in my testing environment. We are using VMware solutions as well, but there are trouble with older OS releases, of course.

In a production environment we used this only at update time as (possible) additional desaster recovery step:
- split mirror
- install new system
- reboot the old state (OS,DB,..) when all other stuff fails

But happily, I never had to perform this step.

mfG Peter