HP-UX Dual Boot System

[Brian Watkins]

Our application development team wants to perform compatibility and upgradeability (is that even a word? ) testing of their app on HP-UX 11.0 and 11i, but they don't have the budget for 2 separate systems.

Since HP-UX 11.0 is a requirement, using LPARs isn't an option.

My plan is to use a 2-way rp5405 with 4 internal drives, 11.0 on one mirrored pair and 11i on the other mirror. The server will be using DS2300 disk storage with separate controllers (half the disks for 11.0 on 1 controller, the other half for 11i on the second controller), and both O/S instances will be running OnlineJFS and MirrorDisk-UX.

It will be a bit of a pain to have to reboot all the time so the testers can switch environments, but there's only so much I can do on a limited budget. :)

Can anyone think of anything I may have missed or any other potential problems could be encountered?

I just want to make sure before I spend the money and time on this and then discover that I've left something out or I run into something that wasn't planned for...


Thanks in advance!

Brian

[Pete Randall]

Brian,

That looks like a pretty thorough plan to me. The only thing you're not going to be able to get a realistic picture of will be performance, but you knew that!

Good luck,



Pete

[Jeff Schussele]

Hi Brian,

This is certainly do-able (Is that a word as well?)
Your plan seems sound to me.
I would just insure that you have as equivalent patch environments between 11.0 & 11i as possible i.e. use the same dated patch bundles on both.

BTW, it's good that you're using an rp5405 because HP does not support 11.0 on an rp7405.

Rgds,
Jeff

[Michael Steele_2]

This has been done by other forum members.

I always wondered about inode pointers though.

Say you go along with 11.11 for awhile and then 11.00.

Maybe keep everything application driven out of the O/S vg; vg00.

[Patrick Wallek]

Brian,

Your plan there sounds good. One question I have though: Are you getting the rp5405 new or used? If you are currently looking at new, then I'd recommend looking at used / remarketed equipment.

Everything I have ever bought I have gotten on HP maintenance without a problem and I have had very few hardware problems with used stuff. The reason I say to looked at the used is that you may be able to get a couple of used L3000 machines (so you can have both 11.0 and 11i running at the same time) with appropriate disk for what you are going to pay for the 1 rp5405.

Just something to think about.

[Stefan Farrelly]

Weve used this procedure before, it works fine. The only thing to watch out for is the different VxFS versions on 11i (4) to 11 (3). So any filesystem created on 11i cant be mounted on 11.0 if you reboot. Create them all on 11.0 (v3) and then you can mount on 11.0 and 11i aok.

[Alzhy]

With the Itanium based systems -- you won't only have dual but muli-boot environments -- Linux, Windows 2003, VMS and HPUX! As everyone knows - an OE environment is just a matter of picking which disk it is stored on and booting off of it. If you have several scsi disks - then you can load a diffrent OS on each and selectively boot off of each.. Having not personally used an Itanium boxen -- I cannot say for sure if BCH (boot control handler) now offers more configurability as far as boot paths are concerned -- ie. a boot manager of sorts..

[Patrick Wallek]

The rp5405 isn't Itanium though. It is PA-RISC. And HP-UX 11.0 will *not* run on Itanium machines.

[Brian Watkins]

Thanks for the quick responses!

Stefan, good advice on the VxFS versions. That should help avoid some headaches :)

[Alzhy]

BTW, Does any one know if the Itanium systems already offer a much improved BCH -- so you can have more boot PATHS configure instead of just 2 (or 3?) -- PRI and ALT?

Brian, if you want both an 11.0 and 11i system running on the same rp5405 -- why not use Virtual Partitions (vPar) -- I know there wis (was) a free version that allow you to have 2 vPars with a CPU each. You can have one vPar running 11.0 and another running 11i -- am not certain though if this is supported or would work at all. Oops -- scratch this... vPars only work with 11i... ;-)