SAN booting from alternate paths, Itanium, 11iv2

[William Shaw]

Hello, I have setup a SAN boot system with dual 9784 controllers in an rx4640 system. I would like to be able to boot from either of the 2 physical paths to my boot disks, but I cannot find a way to set that up. The EFI boot menu only allows me to boot from the path that I installed through. (I liked the old series 900 machines where you could manually define your alternate boot paths, it appears with the itaniums that is no longer possible). Once the system is booted I have set it up so LVM will failover to the alt path disks in case of primary path failure. But I would also like to be able to boot from that alternate path. EFI boot manager doesn't appear to support the manual entry of boot path information, it only wants to use things it already knows about! catch 22 or what? Any suggestions? Thanks!

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Once the OS supports an alternate boot path, EFI should as well.

You need to make sure the LUN on the SAN is assigned with the ownership to the correct WWN and then run through the standard boot portion of the mirroring document I'm posting in.

Concenrate on the last few lines:

pvcreate -B /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0 #use real disk

mkboot -l /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0
mkboot -a "hpux -lq (;0)/stand/vmunix" /dev/rdsk/c1t0d0 # use real disk


# mkboot -b /usr/sbin/diag/lif/updatediaglif -p ISL -p AUTO -p HPUX -p PAD -p LABEL /dev/rdsk/c?t?d?

If you are running 64-bit OS:

# mkboot -b /usr/sbin/diag/lif/updatediaglif2 -p ISL -p AUTO -p HPUX -p PAD -p LABEL /dev/rdsk/c?t?d?


vgextend /dev/vg00 /dev/dsk/c1t0d0 # same thing
lvextend -m 1 /dev/vg00/lvol1 /dev/dsk/c1t0d0

# real disk. repeat for other lvols

lvlnboot -r /dev/vg00/lvol3 # root fs /
lvlnboot -s /dev/vg00/lvol2 #swap
lvlnboot -d /dev/vg00/lvol2 #swap/dump
lvlnboot -b /dev/vg00/lvol1
lvlnboot -R
lvlnboot -v
setboot
setboot -a 52.1.0 # second disk

SEP

[William Shaw]

Steven, thanks for your detailed reply. Unfortunately I don't think it addressed my issue. I am not trying to mirror any drives, I simply have 2 paths to my boot device, through 2 independent SAN fabrics. As long as the path I installed the OS through is connected, the system boots fine. And when both paths are connected and the OS is up and running, I can disconnect either path and my applications continue to run fine, the OS remains up and running, etc. Good so far. But, in a situation where my primary path might be down and not be immediately recoverable, I need to be able to boot the system from that alternate path. And this is the problem, the EFI boot menu does not allow me to manually define an alternate boot path like the old 900 series machines. And if the EFI boot menu doesn't know that path is available, it will never boot to it.

Bottom line: How do I manually define an alternate path in the EFI boot menu? I know the hardware path, 0/4/0/x/x/... but there does not seem to be a way to tell EFI to use it.

Thanks.

[Sameer_Nirmal · Accepted solution]

If you run #setboot -a , the alternate boot option should get added to the EFI boot option list.
check out # seboot -h for HA alternate path as well.
Refer the man page of seboot(1M)

This work in the same way as that of on PA-RISC BCH based servers.

[Enrico P.]

Hi,
setboot command should work for you:

1. Add EFI primary and high availability boot path menu entries.

# setboot -p <-- Set primary disk
# setboot -h <-- Set mirror disk
# setboot -b on <-- Set autoboot on
2. Verify that the primary and mirror boot paths are configured properly.
# setboot

3. Test the new mirror by booting off of it.
# shutdown -r -y 0
4. Select "HP-UX HA Alternate Boot" to test the mirror.

EFI Boot Manager ver 1.10 [14.61] Firmware ver 2.21 [4334]
Please select a boot option
HP-UX Primary Boot: 0/1/1/0.1.0
HP-UX HA Alternate Boot: 0/1/1/1.2.0
EFI Shell [Built-in]

5. Verify which disk/kernel you booted from.
# grep "Boot device" /var/adm/syslog/syslog.log

If not:

Create a new EFI boot option.
Reboot and select the EFI "Boot Option Maint menu" --> "Add a
boot Option", then select the correct disk. Select "EFI" -->
"HPUX" --> "HPUX.efi". Then name the entry to either
"HP-UX Primary boot" or "HP-UX alternate boot".

Enrico

[William Shaw]

Thank you! setboot command is what I needed. I can now boot my OS from either path.

Case closed. Best regards, Bill