Booting HPUX from SAN

[Seth Clarke]

Does anyone know of some good documentation and maybe a few setup examples of preparing a PA-RISC system to boot from a SAN?
I'm not having any luck searching docs.hp.com

[Torsten.]

Should not be a problem.
Present a LUN to the server and install the OS on it.
FC LUNS are handled just like local disks, more or less.

[Tim Nelson]

How about this.

http://docs.hp.com/en/7408/HPUXSANBootWP_final_v2_update.pdf

[Seth Clarke]

I saw that document but I was looking more for a step-by-step guide with some screen shots or at least a walk through.

I'll try presenting some disk and installing on a test system. I want the local disk to remain unchanged, that way I can recover the original system build by interrupting the boot process

[Torsten.]

As said before, FC connected disks are handled just like local disks.

This is the config from a HP9000 server.
In BCH you can see this:

...Primary Boot Path: 0/0/12/0/0.5.30.0.0.1.0
Boot Actions: Boot from this path.
If unsuccessful, go to next path.

HA Alternate Boot Path: 0/0/0/2/0.6
Boot Actions: Boot from this path.
If unsuccessful, go to next path.
...

The primary boot path in this example is a LUN in a SAN, the alternate is a local disk.


If you want to use both, just mirror the local disk to the LUN and set the appropriate boot path.


What kind of "walk-through" do you need?
How to mirror a disk or how to install the OS?


Note: The array along with the FC HBA must be supported for boot.

[Seth Clarke]

In a boot-from-SAN situation, the system ROM at the ISL stage has just a minimal FC driver. When you do a SEA from the ISL> prompt to search for bootable devices, individual SCSI disks are found, but no SAN LUNs will be found. Only the FC cards will be found. The minimal FC driver can't log into the fabric, and there's no way to scan the 1000's of possible FC hardware paths looking for LUNs. With SCSI, there's only 16 addresses on each SCSI card to scan, so that doesn't take very long to do.

I may need to boot to the install media and load the driver that way

[Torsten.]

How to search for possible boot devices on SAN from BCH or anything was not your question ...

[Seth Clarke]

I apologize for any confusion.

I have an operating system already installed on the local disk and I also presented SAN disk to the system. I want to be able to install a newer OS on the SAN disk and boot to that. And if I need to, I can go back to the older OS by booting to the local disk.

My initial question was looking for documentation from HP and there doesn't seem to be any... or it's hidden really well

[Torsten.]

I think I understand now.

A HP9000 server can store 2 or 3 boot pathes, the primary, the HA alternate and the alternate (depends on the system).

If you present a LUN from SAN and start the installer, you will see all available disks in a dropdown menu. Now you can select the target disk and install the OS. This disk will become the primary boot disk automagically.
;-)

To be safe, you can note down this path and boot from this disk directly from BCH.

Local disk you'll find via the BCH search command.

Normally, you will set the primary path to the primary boot disk, the HA alternate to the mirror and the alternate to another disk (DVD/LAN or your SAN disk).

As long as you know the hardware path to your SAN LUN there is no need to search for the disk.

Is this the answer you are looking for?