Boot from SAN/FC Disks -- Good Practice?

[Alzhy]

1. Is it possible to boot off SAN disks (HSG80)connected via SecurePath? Or if not will an EVA (with out without SecurePath)do?

2. Is this good practice? Anyone Doing this at all?

[Massimo Bianchi]

Hi,
today there was a similar thread, i think that you can be interested.

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0xc712a6c51a80254ab5a96ebfaba70ea0,00.html

Massimo

[Sarvesh A Dhuri]

I dont think so there is any problem using the SAN disk for botting the system . In fact i have seen better performance comapred to internal SCSI disk
We have HP Unis systems booting from VA7100 working without any problem

[Michael Tully]

I've this debate before with my friend Harry about booting off external devices. I believe it will work and work well, (depending on the type of array of course) but the one drawback I always see is what happens if the (brocade type) switch dies ??

I would stick with the internal mirrored disks and have a third image in your SAN as a 'lifeboat' (good name but not my creation) Remember most of the activity from the internal disks are read, so just having the operating system and nothing else should fix just about any performance query.

[Ed Sampson]

I think it depends largely on your shop and how you are organized. If you are with a small shop and have control over the SAN environment, then go for it. I'm in a larger shop, and SAN support is from a different group internally. They are looking at tiered storage and some other technologies. If you have all of your root drives out on the SAN, it becomes harder to freeup resourses on the SAN to do any reconfiguration for performance or cost reduction. In other words, don't put all of your eggs in one basket. Performance wise I think it would be a plus. What I would like to do is mirror the internal drive to external storage and get a view of I/O patterns. I think we would see a lot of read traffic switch over the the SAN because it is faster and has a lot more cache on the controllers, but that may depend on the other loads on the SAN (application, DB etc..).
Hope this helps..

[Michael Steele_2]

If you can eliminate the single point of failure with BCV's and redundent fibre connections then explore this.

If not, then PARISC firmware was not designed with SAN boot disks in mind. So don't, because you'll lose single user and LVM maintenance mode when you lose the disk array or SAN connection. Leaving only a reinstall from cdrom or ignite tape.