HP-UX SAN Boot on Itanium

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Hi All,

I need some pointers on doing SAN boot on Itanium - I've donbe this several times on PA-RISC without any problems, but not on IA64 - I know that I will have to deal with EFI, rather than BCH - what differences can I expect?

- Can EFI 'see' SAN disks? I know that BCH on PA-RISC couldn't 'see' any further than the FC HBA, and you needed to know the full HW path to the disk (I mean that an SEA IPL wouldn't find boot disks out of the FC HBA)

- Anyone have a good document explaining how I will need to specify these disks in EFIs own hardware path format?

- We may also replicate the disks to another site and boot DR systems from them there - I know this will involve changing boot paths in NVRAM, and reconstructing the root VG from LVM maintenance mode (as hardware paths will inevitably change) - Anyone have any experience of doing this - Am I missing anything?

Thx

Duncan

[Steven E. Protter]

I think you have a reasonable plan.

I think the IPL should be able to see bootable devices. I recall the SEA showing tape drives on the SAN that were available, even though they could not be booted from.

SEP

[Duncan Edmonstone]

Just pinging this back to the top - anyone?

Thx

Duncan

[Suraj Singh_1]

I think it should be something like :-

At EFI Boot Manager, select "Go to Boot option Maintenance Menu." --> "Add a Boot Option."

There you need to add the full path of the SAN disk.

[Duncan Edmonstone]

C'mon guys - has no-one attempted this? How about the last part (booting a replicated boot disk at a seperate site)? Even if it was on PA-RISC?

Thx

Duncan

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,
Are you using Secure Path and, which volume manager are you using. I tried SAN boot with SP (PA-RISC) installed but could not get it work.

But, if you manage booting with SP installed, does you need to boot in maintanance mode if the hardware path has changed or can SP handle that.

And, what about the dynamic multipathing in VxVm, does it make SP unnecessary.

[Duncan Edmonstone]

No SecurePath - it will be with EMC storage - we may (or may not) use PowerPath - but this behaves differently from SecurePath anyway.

Will be using LVM, not using VxVM.

HTH

Duncan