Booting Integrity rx2600 from the PCI RAID card and MSA30 JBOD... is anybody doing this?

[Brian M Rawlings]

Hi, I posted this query to the storage forum, but nobody has responded. Since this one crosses some boundries, I'm posting it here, on the HP-UX side. Hopefully this is OK within the rules and traditions of the forum.

HP says that it supports Integrity rx2600 (and other Integrity Itanium servers) booting from external JBOD (a dual-bus MSA30, which appears to be HP's only supported JBOD for Integrity), using the PCI Smart Array 6402 2-channel RAID Controller.

Is there anybody out there who has done this, and seen it work? Not just running it as RAID storage, but booting HP-UX 11i from it?

HP also says that they recommend keeping an internal boot disk, presumably to help troubleshoot issues with the RAID card, and maybe to help get it set up and working in the first place. That makes sense.

The question arises because Mirrordisk/UX is a per-processor license, and in dual-CPU units, it is more than double the cost of the RAID card. In fact, the dual-port RAID card is almost the same price as the dual-port SCSI card that we'd need to run the external JBOD tray anyway (so the redundancy is just about free).

Over the dozen or so systems that are involved in this project, the dollars saved are enough to buy another complete server and storage set, but we are hesitant to be the first on the street to try this, even though HP says it is supported.

Lastly, I had thought to get everything installed, patched, and working on the single internal 36GB boot drive, and then use Ignite to make a recovery tape, boot from the tape, and copy the boot image out to the RAID-protected storage.

As patches and updates happen, I would use Ignite to keep the "hot spare boot drive" (the internal 36GB drive) in sync with the OS boot disk on the RAID controller. Does anybody see a flaw in this scheme, other than the manual nature and the time involved?

Best Regards, --bmr

[Scot Bean]

Are you planning to buy one and try it out?

If not, you should contact official HP sales reps to make sure this configuration is as good for you in reality as it seems on paper.

[Brian M Rawlings]

Scot: HP tech support says that this configuration is supported, blessed, and known to work. I'm just wondering if anybody out there is actually doing this, and can verify that they have booted HP-UX from storage on this raid card (as you say, practice vs. theory), and, if so, do they have any insights or gotchas that they would care to share (for points, naturally)

HP Support also says that if you have trouble with your raid card, the system will be difficult to impossible to troubleshoot unless you have a regular boot disk you can use to get HP-UX up and running, to do the config/setup of the raid card (if it gets set wrong or has to be replaced and have the raid set up again). That all makes sense, and seems to be the one big gotcha with this redundant boot scheme (redundant storage, single point of failure in the controller, I know, I know...)

So... anybody actually seen this done? Any HP folks who can comment on lab systems where they did this? Bueller? Fry? Anybody?