booting from EVA san hangs

[B Cave]

hi all,

I am trying to get a bl465c to boot (centos) from san (EVA4400). Relatively new to SAN technology. I have installed OS on partitions on a vdisk that is presented to the server. multi path IO is configured. the boot loader doesnt load. In the RBSU, boot order is hba port 1, then hba port 2, then E200i. If I present the vdisk to another server, i can see that the mbr is installed, and /boot and / are correctly configured.

Setup: 2 x brocade switches in c7000 enclosure, 2 x controllers in EVA. each switch has 1 x fibre cable to each controller (total 4 cables for redundancy).

No zones are configured on the switch.

I have configured HBA in the Qlogic bios to enable selectable boot and set added both fc ports with appropriate lun (this part is new to me, so i'm not sure if this is necessary?)

Still can't boot. The vdisk is also currently presented to another server, but it is not mounted / in use, dont think this should affect it, correct? Also, if I log on to the brocade switch management, the port that the HBA connects to is not active (no active light in diagram). If i reboot, it is active during install and if I am in qlogic bios. Just at boot it is not...

Anything obvious that I am doing wrong here?

Thanks.

[JKytsi]

Well ...start with zoning. You can't access the EVA without that. And after zoning is finished, check from qlogic bios "scan for fibre devices" if You can see your LUNs properly.

[B Cave]

At the bottom of my zoning config screen, I get "Effective zone config: Default, All Access"

I have now created a new zone on each san switch, which consists of the port that connects to the blade and the WWN of the HBA (there are 2 x WWN's).

Can still see 2 x devices with all the luns and have associated the relevant lun in qlogic bios. still not booting.
e.g. device 1, lun 1 and device 2, lun 1 as bootable, with selectable boot config enabled.

Do I need to do this?

Also, when blade powers up after BIOS, I get a message saying booting from hard drive and it still hangs there. The port on the san switch still shows as inactive.

[B Cave]

Problem solved.

Solution:
CTRL+Q to go into qlogic bios on startup.
For each port, go to configuration settings -> adapter settings and enable "Host Adapter BIOS".

Configure selectable boot menu.

Voila.

Thanks for the input on the zones, a question on that before I close this - if i leave only default access with all full access, that should be fine?

[JKytsi · Accepted solution]

Great .. I just maked a guess that You have enabled the FC BIOS =)
"I have configured HBA in the Qlogic bios to enable selectable boot and set added both fc ports with appropriate lun ".

But zoning is a best practice. Do a zone to both fabrics which has the blade port or WWN alias and the EVA ports.

[B Cave]

ok, so with zoning:
switch 1, zone1 has: WWN of 1 HBA port, the SAN switch port and then both WWN of both ports on the SAN (1 for each controller).
switch 2, zone 1 has: WWN of other HBA port, the san switch port and then both ports on SAN.

Is that correct?
And then default access would be no access as best practice?

[JKytsi]

Yep ..no access as a default. Access only via zoning.

You have couple choises to pick when creating zones. Use port based or WWN based zoning.

With EVA side it has not so much difference but in the blade side...
If You use WWNs in a zone it has no effect in which server bay the blade is IF You have to move the blade for some reason.

Port based is "fixed" to certain server bay.

[B Cave]

solution found