Boot from SAN.

[FerSAN_2]

Hi all,
I have a doubt about boot from SAN.
In the company I work, we have all production servers with two HBA (Qlogic or Emulex), for this reason we need path redundancy in every moment, also in the start up process.

I start enabling the bios of one HBA, discover the boot disk and after that I install the OS.
When the OS is installed, I enabled the other HBA bios.
Is this correct, or I should I have only one HBA bios enabled?
I asked that, because I listened some storage provider, that only one HBA must be enabled in all moment.
If somebody have some paper about that, I would like read them.

Thanks.

[IBaltay]

Hi,

Linux Boot from SAN (device mapper) is here:
http://bizsupport1.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c01513866/c01513866.pdf

Windows Boot from SAN (w2k3) is here:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00752455/c00752455.pdf

[FerSAN_2]

Thanks lBaltay, for the links.

If is possible, I would like some opinions of someone who have deployed BFS with two BIOS HBA enabled. And of course, the outcome.

[IBaltay]

Hi,
it should be enabled (BIOS) only on 1 HBA written e.g. here:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/wss2003/techinfo/plandeploy/bootfromsaninwindows.mspx

in the boot specific requirements...

[Steven Clementi]

I've implemented multipath BfS for several customers with varying types of OS's including Windows, Linux and VMware.

In every case, you must only present 1 path to the server during the initial setup of the OS. After which... and after you have the appropriate multipath drivers loaded, you would then present the remaining paths to the server.

In each environment, things worked out as expected.

The links provided state some of these concepts and/or imply some of them as well.

There are "things" to think about when designing a BfS configuration... like where your page file is located... and what restrictions and/or recommendations you should understand. Again, these are found in the links provided.


Steven

[FerSAN_2]

Thanks Steven and lbaltay,

I suppose i have solved the issue.
To sum up, first of all, I enabled the HBA Bios of one HBA, installed the OS, Drivers and Mpio. After that, I enabled the HBA Bios of the other HBA, and detected the luns.
I tested the two path singly (disabling a path at a time) restarted the server, and everything is OK, as it should be.

Thanks.