why install Linux on SAN

[Maaz]

Hi

why should I install my Linux on SAN ?
what are the benefits of installing Linux on SAN ?

please share your experience/comments

any url/doc/comment will be highly appreciated

Regards

[Court Campbell]

Can you elaborate? I am not sure what you are asking. Are you asking about having storage attached to your server, or having your boot disk be a SAN disk?

[Ivan Ferreira]

There are several reasons to do it, and other to not do it.

For example, having the boot disk on the SAN you get the benefit of all Storage features, like redundancy, maybe replication to a DR SITE, snapshots, etc.

You may clone your disk and boot another host with the same configuration. You can just change you host and boot again from the same storage.

In a virtualized environment, you can have high availability sharing the disk between hosts.

[Maaz]

Hi Dear Court Campbell thanks for help

>Can you elaborate?
yes

>Are you asking about having storage attached to your server
No

>or having your boot disk be a SAN disk?
I have no idea of the subject, actually my boss told me to evaluate the pros and cons of installing the Linux on SAN.
first I searched google, but found nothing related
http://www.google.com/linux?hl=en&q=benefits+of+installing+Linux+on+SAN&btnG=Search

after googling I throwed the same query to the forum ;)

Hi Ivan Ferreira
>For example, having the boot disk on the SAN
>you get the benefit of all Storage features...
only the boot disk i.e /boot filesystem only ?


>You may clone your disk and boot another host with the same configuration.
>You can just change you host and boot again from the same storage.
e.g I have two BL480C machines, I installed the OS on SAN using one machine(server1), installed/configured/run some services/apps, shutdown the machine(server1), now can I boot the other machine(server2) from the OS installed on the SAN ? .. and can run all the services/apps ?

>In a virtualized environment, you can have high availability sharing the disk
>between hosts.
got it, and agreed ;)

Regards
Maaz

[SJO EGGER]

hello

i would not install the OS on SAN if you have BL480C server like you with a local raid controller and disks.

>>>e.g I have two BL480C machines, I installed the OS on SAN using one machine(server1), installed/configured/run some services/apps, shutdown the machine(server1), now can I boot the other machine(server2) from the OS installed on the SAN ? .. and can run all the services/apps ?
yes you can. you have to make changes in your fabric to see the boot disk on the other server and change the wwid at the FC HBA on startup.

[Maaz]

Hi SJO EGGER, thanks for reply

>i would not install the OS on SAN if you have BL480C server like you with a
>local raid controller and disks.
so which type of servers/machines are used to install the OS on SAN ? what if I remove the HDDs from the BL480C ?

Regards
Maaz

[Maaz]

any document/url on this subject, will be appreciated

Regards
Maaz

[Ivan Ferreira]

>>> Only the boot disk i.e /boot filesystem only ?

The entire operating system

>>> now can I boot the other machine(server2) from the OS installed on the SAN ? .. and can run all the services/apps ?

You can create a hardware based clone and yes, you can boot server2 from that disk. You can boot server2 from the same server1 disk as long server1 is down. You will have some reconfigurations to do, like ethernet as you MAC will change, but is less trouble than installing the entire operating system or doing a bare-metal restore.

[Ivan Ferreira · Accepted solution]

Resons to do it:

http://www.dell.com/content/topics/global.aspx/vectors/en/2005_bfs?c=us&l=en