Boot vPar from EMC

[Enbin Hu]

Hi experts,

We are testing the vPars on a N4000, with 1 vPar boot from the internal disks and other 2 from attached EMC disks. The problem we encountered is when we reboot a vPar that is using EMC as boot disk, the other vPars will hang and also the booting time is very long (25min). But when boot a vPar from the internal disk, the others won't be affected and also the boot time is only 3 min. Is there anyone had similar problem before? Any comments from experts (like Harry Brown)?

Thanks in advance.

[Stefan Farrelly]

Weve tried booting from EMC disks before but its just too slow, and unsupported by HP anyway. The extra communication time caused by cards, cables, EMC sym, etc. before HP-UX gets to the disk just slows down the boot process too much. I dont know anyone who has managed to get this to work successfully. We use EMC for all our data, but internals for booting.

[Enbin Hu]

Stefan,

Thanks for your reply. The slow boot is one problem. But the biggest problem is that when one vPar boots, the others got hung. In theory, the vPars should not affect each other, that is one of the points that HP has been trying to sell. I should also mention that the impact (of hang) only happens when the booting vPar is in 'load' and early part of 'boot' stage. Once the rc scripts start to run, everything is ok.

[Stefan Farrelly]

Hi Enbin,

well, if HP says its supposed to work (and not hand the other server when one is booting!) then all I can suggest is to log a call with HP and get them to fix it.

Does this mean HP now supports booting from EMC ? EMC are one HP's major competitors, I cant imagine them supporting it ?

[Enbin Hu]

Stefan,

A call has been logged already with HP, but no solution yet. I was just trying to see if anyone else out there had this same issue before and how they dealt with it. Thanks.

[Alberto Tagliaferri_1]

I'm also planning to boot from a DiskSystem (HP XP, this time) and I like to hear the end of the story.