topic Re: Diskless blades in BladeSystem - General

Diskless blades

Ugo Bellavance (ATQ) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 18:16:49 GMT

Hi,

I bought 2 BL495c G5, having plans of using them as diskless blades for virtualization. Is there any recommendations on this? I do have an iSCSI SAN outside the enclosure, and I saw that an USB key was available from HP for usb boot (580385-B21). Enclosure: C7000. Interconnects: 2x Virtual Connect Flex-10.

Any insights welcome.

Regards,

Re: Diskless blades

JonathanT — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:53:31 GMT

We're booting the HP branded VMWare (we also tried XenServer) just fine off the internal SD cards in some BL490C G6 blades. Saves a ton of money on expensive SSDs or trying to boot from the SAN. Search for "HP Vmware" or "HP XenServer" and you should come up with the download links and the white papers.

Re: Diskless blades

Ugo Bellavance (ATQ) — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:55:46 GMT

Sounds great. We're planning on using Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization, which provides a stand-alone hypervisor. I guess that we could boot from it on a USB key. Can you then access the SAN?

Do you have an idea what is different in the HP USB key?

Thanks,

Re: Diskless blades

Adrian Clint — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 11:41:37 GMT

HP USB keys are the definite HP supported versions of the OS and usually contain the HP management agents already installed.

Nothing you could not do yourself.. but time = money.

Re: Diskless blades

Emil Velez — Wed, 23 Dec 2009 20:45:18 GMT

You can boot the blades from ISCSI or Fibrechannel (boot from san).

Those are options where you do not need local disks

Re: Diskless blades

Ugo Bellavance (ATQ) — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 14:02:35 GMT

Hi,

Is it possible to easily boot from SAN using the LOM NICs?