Integrity server

[LIJEESH N G]

I need to know about boot disk partitions in Integrity servers & diffrence between PA-RISC & Integrity servers, i am using Integrity server.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Big topic.

Boot process on Integrity, IA-64 Itanium server is managed by EFI. Thats very different compared to how its done on PA-RISC.

Forum post:
http://forums11.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do;HP-FORUMS-S-WPA-IDX=HzZpgrbLG9cnNT92L1657f05JchvyhNvG22QyBV7rdQJwMtVGCRL!-434158014!1012532227?threadId=1016808

HP Education course:
http://www.education.hp.com/datasheets/h5875s.pdf

The big business difference is you'll still be able to buy Integrity servers from HP after December 31, 2008.

SEP

[Matti_Kurkela]

The data disks can be used just the same in both PA-RISC and Integrity. Only the system disks are different.

PA-RISC:

At the beginning of a PA-RISC system disk, there is a boot LIF. That's the only part of the disk that is immediately readable by the PA-RISC firmware. The boot LIF is created using the "mkboot" command. With PA-RISC, if the offline diagnostic utilities are installed, they're placed into the boot LIF too.

After the boot LIF, there is the LVM header which is created with

pvcreate -B /dev/rdsk/cXtYdZ

The "-B" option is important: without it, pvcreate puts the LVM header at the beginning of the disk and overwrites the boot LIF. If the disk is pvcreated without the "-B" option, the boot LIF cannot be installed to the disk. If you forget this option in e.g. mirroring a system disk, you'll have to start the mirroring procedure over at the beginning.

The rest of the disk is controlled by the LVM. In a system disk, the first three LVs must be contiguous and in precise order. This is because the boot code in the LIF does not really understand LVM: it just skips over the LIF and the LVM header and expects to find the /stand filesystem next.

The first LV is lvol1 = /stand, which must use the old HFS filesystem. Its simpler structure allows the LIF boot code to be smaller.

The second LV is lvol2, which is the primary swap/dump partition.

The third LV is lvol3, which is the root partition of the operating system.

Integrity:
An Integrity HP-UX system disk is partitioned into three slices using the "idisk" command.

The first slice (cXtYdZs1) contains the EFI boot loader. The EFI boot loader is installed using the "mkboot" command on an Integrity server.
NOTE: the internal working of Integrity mkboot is very different from PA-RISC mkboot. Don't even try to use Integrity mkboot to prepare a disk for PA-RISC or vice versa.

The second slice (cXtYdZs2) is fully controlled by LVM and contains exactly the same LV layout as with PA-RISC.
Because the EFI boot loader can understand VxFS file system, on Itanium the /stand filesystem does not need to be HFS.
The pvcreate command for a system disk is a bit different in Integrity: the -B option is not needed, but the slice number must be specified, i.e.

pvcreate /dev/rdsk/cXtYdZs2

The third slice (cXtYdZs3) is reserved for offline diagnostic utilities. These might be useful if your system is so sick it cannot even boot to single-user mode, and you need to determine whether there is a hardware problem.

MK