topic Re: IGNITE to disk? in Operating System - HP-UX

IGNITE to disk?

RayEvans — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:34:25 GMT

I have an extra disk in each of my itanium systems that are not currently being used (supposed to be mirrored, but want to try this first). When looking through SAM they are listed as unused.

I would like to use ignite to create a copy of the live/operational disk onto this unused disk.

I would like to have an end result of an exact copy that would be a boot device to bring the system up on.

Is this possible?

Is it possible with some additional steps such as booting through the ignite recovery process?

Thanks for your imput

Ray

Re: IGNITE to disk?

Patrick Wallek — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 21:57:32 GMT

No, what you want to do is not possible with Ignite.

Re: IGNITE to disk?

Robert-Jan Goossens — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 22:17:33 GMT

Hi Ray,

Yes you can create an image to disk, but i case of a disaster you will not be able to boot from the other disk.

You can however create an iso image on your second disk with make_media_install command. The other thing you will need is a dvd writer somewere in you network.

doc en some threads.

http://forums12.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=109447627+1
202907741042+28353475&threadId=1127321

http://docs.hp.com/en/5992-1959/ch11s03.html

http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do;HP-FORUMS-S-WPA-ID
X=HczDGTYNqNZdzbspLp6jVNbGnVlv4hgYSLlSYlc09ytjpsXGpc1V!30965674!75269
0606?threadId=1022206

Regards,
Robert-Jan

Re: IGNITE to disk?

Shane Seymour — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 05:45:43 GMT

What Robert-Jan said is not strictly true, while you do need an ISO filesystem containing the recovery archive to install it you can dd an ISO image directly onto a hard-drive and boot directly from it and recover the system. However that's not really what you want.

I'd recommend DRD instead of Ignite-UX as it is designed specificly for doing what you are asking for. Depending on a few things you can even create a copy of the system apply patches or kernel changes and then reboot to the new disk and make sure that everything has gone ok. DRD should be available from software depot.

http://h20392.www2.hp.com/portal/swdepot/displayProductInfo.do?productNumber=DynRootDisk

(11i v2 and v3 only)

Re: IGNITE to disk?

Robert-Jan Goossens — Thu, 21 Feb 2008 07:54:59 GMT

Hi Shane,

Thanks for the notification and the correction, I updated my notes.

Best regards,
Robert-Jan

Re: IGNITE to disk?

Shane Seymour — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 00:13:10 GMT

Hi Robert-Jan,

By the way the concept of putting a ISO image onto a disk can be a very powerful one. If you have a large SAN with a lot of systems connected to it you can join the two OE dvds into one image and get a FC lun created that is just the right size for it (then make it read-only) and a lot of systems can share OE media without needing to mount the physical DVD on every system that might need it.

If you've got multiple systems you want to install (rather than recover) they can all access the FC lun at the same time to install from the image.

This concept can also be extended to a set of minimal ignite boot images for systems that require dual media or two step recovery or just the one minimal boot image so you can boot from it and then connect to an Ignite server if your site doesn't allow network booting (or things that it relies on like tftp). Make sure that the recovery shell support is on the minimal media and you've also got ready access to the recovery shell (which can also be accessed via the network from an Ignite server as well).

If you had multiple LUNs with different images on them you'd need reasonable documentation to be able to find them relatively quickly (you wouldn't want to have to boot from each one in succession just to find the correct LUN with the version of Ignite-UX or the OE you want on it). The luns don't have to be that big (just big enough for the image) so it also wouldn't be extremely expensive in terms of disk usage.

Re: IGNITE to disk?

VK2COT — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 02:25:03 GMT

Hello,

As Shane suggested, the best option is to use
DYnamic Root DIsk (similar to what Solaris
Live Update and AIX Alternate Root are).

Here is how simple it is in HP-UX 11.21:

drd clone â t /dev/dsk/cytydy â x overwrite=true [-x mirror_disk=/dev/dsk/c2t3d1]

Or, if you are using HP-UX 11.31, I would suggest agile views. For example:

drd clone â t /dev/disk/disk32 â x overwrite=true [-x mirror_disk=/dev/disk/disk41]

Note that all partitions on Itanium disk
are created and s1 and s2 are copied.
Current release of DRD does not copy the HP
service partition (s3).

Cheers,

VK2COT