topic Re: Booting Linux from SAN in Operating System - Linux

Booting Linux from SAN

Roberto Espinoza Sánche — Mon, 23 May 2005 17:33:59 GMT

Which is the EFI procedure to enable FC botting from SAN? The RH AS 3.0 was installed from cd in a EVA LUN without problems, however, after rebooting the system doesn't start because EFI doesn't have a EVA LUN entry.

Re: Booting Linux from SAN

Eric van Dijken — Wed, 25 May 2005 08:51:25 GMT

Mayhaps you could give us a little more information about the hardware used. And the things you have tried.

Best guess, for now:
Did you enable the BIOS (ctrl-Q on systeem boot) for the FCA controllers (in case you are using Qlogic FCA-2312 on Proliant servers)

Re: Booting Linux from SAN

Steven E. Protter — Wed, 25 May 2005 09:50:52 GMT

This may be a disk preparation issue.

You need to see that the World Wide Name(WWN) assigned to the LUN matches that of the fiber card on the Linux box.

Then make sure there is no scsi id conflict between the fiber card and any other devices on the system.

Then you may need to boot the server with a disk preparation cd and set up the disk array prior to doing the OS install.

SEP

Re: Booting Linux from SAN

Roberto Espinoza Sánche — Wed, 25 May 2005 09:57:31 GMT

The server is an itanium rx2620
The HBA is an A6826A
The storage is an EVA 3000

The fact is that the OS was installed on the EVA lun from the itanium, however i don't see any fs0 or fs1 device from EFI shell when I type map, so i'm unable to boot the OS that was installed.

Re: Booting Linux from SAN

Eric van Dijken — Thu, 26 May 2005 00:38:49 GMT

I have no knowledge about Itanium systems.

But on HP Proliant systems, you have to enable the BIOS for the Qlogic FCA's. Without it, you are not able to boot from a SAN disk.
During installation all will work fine. As the PCI scan will find the FCA and the driver gets loaded. But during system startup, there is no driver, so the system has to have something to find the SAN disk. This is were the BIOS comes into view.