Boot disks on A3311A

[Thomas Grace_1]

I am trying to make it so that I do not have any internal disk, I want to use the external storage enclosure A3311A to house all of my disks. Is it recommended that this be done?? I can't find any information on doing this. Any drawbacks or issues?? Is this supported by HP??

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Thomas,

Yes this is supported.
I would recommend that you provide redundancy however.
Either by using 2 separate Jamaicas, or providing dual paths to this one & insure it has dual power supplies.

Rgds,
Jeff

[S.K. Chan]

Although this would work (having all your disks) on a A3311A (deskside version right?), I would not want my boot disk to reside in the same bus as the rest of my data disks. You probably want to fully utilize the hot-plug feature, that's why you're think of this, right ? The only issue that came across my mind is if you have your boot disk and swap in the same enclosure, they will compete for IO with the rest of the "non-root" disks, hence performance can be impacted. Having internal root disks has its advantage of it not having to share the same hrw path with the rest. Unless you are talking dual paths, multiple enclosures then my point would be invalid.

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I'm guessing that this is probably a K-box which do not have hot-plug internal disks. I NEVER use internal disks because they are not hot-pluggable. Putting your boot disks in a JBOD is a good idea. I always use 2 JBOD's for my boot disks and mirrors and I go one step further. I actually do ras disk copies of the boot disks so that if I am incredibly stupid or load
really, really bad patches, I simply move my 'lifeboat' disks into the boot slots and I'm back in business even faster than you can say Ignite.

[Thomas Grace_1]

So I guess it's a good idea to have a mirrored copy of the boot disk, should it be Mirror/UX or should I have a disk just dedicated as a hardware copy?? Is there a good way to copy this internal boot disk to the exteranal drive?? Is dd the best way or ignite?? Thanks for all of you responses.

[Jeff Schussele]

Mirror-UX is the way to go.
Costs, but it's well worth it in ease of mirror creation as well as when that mirror's needed.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Deshpande Prashant]

Hi
The priced product Mirror-Ux will help you build the mirror. Still use the Ignite product to create make_tape_recovery tapes.

Thanks.
Prashant.

[S.K. Chan]

MirrorUX will take away the headache of having to manually copy your boot disk to another disk and having to synchronize between them regularly. Along with that keep 2 copies of your ignite recovery tapes and that should be good enough. There is recipe to perform manual copy of boot disk (cpio method or dd method), search from the forum and you should be able to find it (just in case you're interested).

[A. Clay Stephenson]

Unless you are running Mirror/UX, it's rather pointless to be worried about hot-plug disks. The idea with Mirror/UX is that you can keep running while you replace the dead drive and then resync the volume group.
Mirror/UX protects you from hardware failures but does nothing to protect you from yourself (e.g. rm -r * oops!!)
because those commands are also faithfully carried on the the mirror as well.

Ignite (or a raw disk copy lifeboat) protects you from the non-hardware related failures.