HP-UX boot from EVA

[Piyush Agrawal_2]

We need to do new installation which has 02 HP Servers rp5400 and these are diskless servers, having no Direct Attached Storage. These are to be connected in Cluster and need to boot off EVA. Is boot from EVA suported on HP-UX ?

Thanks for all the answers in advance.
Regards
Piyush

[Steven E. Protter]

You can boot these servers off the network on lan0.

You can boot these servers to a disk array via a fiber card.

I don't know what EVA stands for but if its covered above, the answer is YES.

SEP

[Piyush Agrawal_2]

Hello Steven,

Thanks for replying. I am sorry for being little too cryptic and using acronyms. EVA stands for Enterprise Virtual Array (..Compaq's cutting edge storage product). These 02 HP servers are connected in SAN to a BROCADE SAN switch and EVA is also connected to the SAN switch. We now want to boot these Servers from the LUN defined in EVA.

Hope this clarifies the situation.
Awaiting reply.

Thanks
Piyush

[Eugeny Brychkov]

Piyush,
why servers are diskless? If you would tell me that user workstations are diskless then I would understand.
There were a lot of discussions is it good to have OS on the local disks or shared storage. I would suggest to use old classic scheme to have root/swap/dump on local disk mirrored pair, and to have EVA for user data exclusively. But decision depends on you.
Booting - root/swap/dump - should be supported, but I would check it once more with local HP support center
Eugeny

[melvyn burnard]

To my knowledge, these are not yet supported for boot/root/swap, but if you need a definitive answer, I think you should log a call with your HP Response Centre

[melvyn burnard · Accepted solution]

Just to confirm, I have found a definitive answer, and it is as I thought.
These arrays are currently NOT supported for boot/root/swap

[Donald Kok]

Hi Piyush,

You need the Tachyon drivers in your OS to be able to connect to the EVA. And you don't have them since your OS is on the EVA. The chicken and egg problem.

Even if it was possible, I think it is a better idea to have your boot disk in the system.

Good luck,
Donald