booting from emc device!!!

[Pelephone System]

I am wondering if there are sites that are booting from EMC device.
I want to make a storage consolidation and to use only EMC storage but I'm afraid about
putting the Hpux on EMC device?

What are the advantages?Disadvantages?
Is it recommended?
I'll be glad to get a technical answers.

[Stefan Farrelly]

Yes, it is supported. Weve tried it. It saves, obviously, on all the local and internal HP disks you have as they are now redundant.

However, the disadvantes are that if you have a boot problem its very easy for HP to blame EMC and vice versa - which means youre stuck. Its nice having servers and boot devices all from the same company (HP) as its a one-stop shop to diagnose and fix problems.

I also beleive there is a problem in the event of a power outage affecting HP and EMC. The HP servers nowadays boot much much faster than an EMC frame does - which means the HP's boot, cant find a boot device, and drop to PDC requiring manual intervention. Someone was trying to find out how to modify the PDC so that the question ...you have 10 seconds to interrupt boot... could be changed to something like 10 minutes! I dont know if this was ever resolved.

There was a joke about a large company with hundreds of HP servers over many sites, some unattended, all booting off EMC, and after a weekend powerdown over all sites not one HP rebooted as all the EMC's took much longer to boot up - as a result some poor sods had to go to hundreds of servers manually doing BOOT PRI or powercycling the HP's now that the EMC was up:-)

In my opinion having HP as a one-stop shop to fix booting problems is the clincher. We now use only HP drives for booting.

[Michael Steele_2]

Don't do for you'll lose single user and LVM manintenance mode if the EMC device ever fails. If short, all of your trouble shooting utilities will also be lost.

If you do do it then bad block changes to NO.

[sekar parthasarathy]

hi,

http://forums.itrc.hp.com/cm/QuestionAnswer/1,,0xddfba14d9abcd4118fef0090279cd0f9,00.html

Regards

sekar.

[Alexander M. Ermes]

Hi there.
What we have done on our systems with fc attached storage ?
We got SCSI disk arrays with enough disk space to boot our system from just in case the EMC does not work correctly.
The EMC is a nice device for storing data, but not to boot from. I would not really trust it.
Rgdfs
Alexander M. Ermes

[Zeev Schultz]

Hi Eithan,
By the way what kind of EMC is this - direct scsi connection or some SAN fabric/loop ?I've
got (somewhere) a bunch of matrices on FC bootable 3-d party & hp arrays so tell me the
model if you go for EMC boot.By the way,correct
me if I'm wrong but you guys were using V-class booting from EMC?Or it were hp jamaica jbods.

Anyway,I prefer to separate (including IO channels) my system storage from my data one.
With all due respect to recent revolutional progress in data virtualization,availability,accessability,redundancy,snapshoting and whatever else I like to keep my system disk apart :)

Zeev