Storage / Cluster Soloution

[Andrew Garlick]

We are proposing to a customer a Cluster configuration based around 2 pairs of LH6000R.

Our customer has requested them to be configured for them with 2x 18gb and 6 x36gb in each box with 3 pairs mirrored.

He wants the 36gb disks in the node server and the 18gb disks in the shared storage unit.

The question is can you boot of the shared storage unit.

Am I going about this in the right way.

[David Navarro]

Hi, Andrew, Of course, you can boot, but it depends if you disk box / server / OS supports booting from external disk, Normally It is Supported.

[Vincent Fleming]

Note that not all HBAs are capable of booting. The D8602's, as I remember, are not because they lack the boot firmware.

It's also strongly not suggested that you page or swap to an external disk unit, particularly if the unit has cache memory - it tends to destroy your cache performance by filling it with paging data rather than your application data.

Good luck

[Enes Dizdarevic]

The answer depends on type of your storage. If it is fibre based (rs12FC, VA, etc) you cannot boot from it because of lack of firmware on HP fibre HBA. If it is SCSI (RS12) you can boot from it but there is another problem.
Since you have two Intel based servers I think you are talking about MS Windows cluster (NT 4.0 or Win2K). For MS cluster every node has to have "local" disk for boot and system. MS cluster service defines disk controller from which system is booted as local controller and other controllers as shared controllers. Since you have only two disks on shared storage all internal disks have to be "local". One shared disk is usually reserved for quorum, so where are you going to put your shared data if you have big ammount for local disks and only one logical drive on shared storage.