Creating a dual boot server

[Lou Regiacorte]

I have an HP K360 running HP-UX 11.00
I need to be able to also run HP-UX 10.20
I have 3 internal disks as follows: 4-gb c0t0d0=vg00 with HP-UX 11.00, c0t5d0 and c0t4d0
both 18-GB drives.
I have 7 external drives in a Jbod enclosure as follows: one 18-GB and 6 4-GB drives.
What would be the best approach to do this?
Could I install HP-UX on a 4-GB external drive so I can preserve the 2 internal 18-GB drives?
What steps would be best for one to take to achieve this?
Thanks
LMR

[Victor BERRIDGE]

Hi,
Yes you should be able to install HP-UX on an external drive and boot from it, I dont know what steps would be best, since are already in HP-UX11 and you want 10.20 the best is a fresh install from CD :
I would to test what I want to do is a Ignite-Ux make_recovery of the existing, use it to reinstall on the 4Gb external drive boot, boot on the external drive and test.
then install on the internal 4Gb HP-UX10.20...
Make again a boot tape, and now up to you to decide which (internal or external) disk is going to be HP-UX10.20 and which is the HP-UX11...
You have the tapes to do the appropriate tasks

Good luck
Victor

[John Waller]

Lou, It depends on what data you need to access under hpux 10.20, if any. I personally would have installed HP-UX 11.00 on one of internal 18Gb disks and put 10.20 on the 4Gb. as it is likely you will be adding more patches or products to the 11.00 system than the 10.20, also you have the chance mirror your vg00 to the external 18Gb. Their is nothing to stop you from setting your alternate boot path to an external disk if you want to use one of the external 4Gb's for your 10.20 boot disk. You need to remember that once you have installed HP-UX 10.20 you will need to make sure that you set your primary and secondary boot paths correctly when you reboot.

[melvyn burnard]

The disc you use to insstall 10.20 is your preference, and I see no reason you should have a problem using one of your external discs.
You would need to do a clean install from cd's and then test the system boots from the 10.20 disc once installed.
A coimmand you may not know about is setboot (1m) and is really useful in this situation, as it allows you to on-line set your primary and alternate boot paths. We use it on a system with 3 OS versions loaded, and have a script that calls setboot, and sets the primary path to the corrrect path for the version we wish to boot from, then shutsdown the system and reboots it.
HTH

[Lou Regiacorte]

Thank you all for you inputs.
I am familiar with the 'setboot' command.
The next question remains, would "vgimport" and "vgchange" be sufficient to make all the current filesystems available and accessible to the newly installed Rel. 10.20?
Thanks again
LMR

[Patrick Wallek]

I know you can vgimport 10.20 volumes on 11, but I don't know about vgimporting 11.0 on 10.20. It should work, I think. I think you would want to be careful about having both 10.20 and 11.0 writing to the same data files. I don't know that it would cause problems, but I can definitely see the potential for problems.

[Victor BERRIDGE]

You may have performance issues, because if I am right the JFS (vxfs)version of HPUX10.20 is not the same as HPUX11...
But you didnt say what was on the external disks because if its something like oracle you are going to suffer (libraries and linking...).
For the rest it should work
Interreting case, Keep us informed !
Good luck
Victor

[Lou Regiacorte]

Thanks for that, Victor!
We do have Sybase running and it uses raw files. I really don't know yet how that's going to affect us and how it is going to workout yet.
I hope we are not biting more than we can chew!
LMR

[Victor BERRIDGE · Accepted solution]

Since you are using raw devices you shouldnt be affected then!, I tell you this because last year I had a performance issue, I announced expected performance based on another K360 already configured and running HPUX11 for the purchase of a K360 but having to run under HPUX10.20...
Same hardware, difference in disk performance about 30%!
HP explained that HPUX10.20 had to do 8 read to have the same data in 1 read under HPUX11...
because of difference between vxfs v2 and vxfs v3 (or something like... that was in spring last year...)
Good luck
Victor

[nnf97]

You could go ahead and install 10.20 on the other harddisk, then interrupt the boot and boot off the 10.20 hard disk.

For sharing data, what you could do is possibly create a seperate file system, which you would use to write the common data between the two versions, and mount that file system at boot time.