Mirrordisk and booting from the SAN

[Mike Smith_33]

Quick note: I have never done HP-UX system administration before, I am transitioning to this as a system that was running Tru64 is being replaced with HP-UX.

I have a quote for a pair of rp3440s using MC serviceguard and including Mirrordisk. The configuration is to be hooked into an existing EVA 5000. The quote included 2 internal drives, which I questioned because as a VMS guy, I boot from a system disk on the EVA. I was told that HP required the internal shelf to be quoted with the drives. I then questioned the need for Mirrordisk since I have an expensive raid box (EVA) to handle redundancy. I was told that this will cover the internal drives.

My question is, can I boot HP-UX from a SAN drive as well? If so, do I need mirrordisk?

[Pete Randall]

Mike,

You can boot from the SAN and thus eliminate the need for the internal drives and MirrorDisk, however HP may have some rule about having to buy the system with at least one internal drive or some such thing. I believe they do have some sort of requirement about memory - you have to buy a minimum amount from HP.


Pete

[Duncan Edmonstone · Accepted solution]

Yes you can boot HPUX from a SAN, and yes this might remove the requirement for the 2 internal disks and Mirrordisk - My only provisos would be:

- Although I've seen it done a fair bit, its not that common many still boot off internal disk -it gives them a warm fuzzy feeling that they can get their host up even if the SAN isn't there - however as long as you invest the time in understanding how HPUX, the EVA and SecurePath are integrated you should be OK. Your going to find the integration between SecurePath and HPUX is still pretty clunky comapared to how it works on VMS/Tru64

- Make sure you have the absolute latest version of SecurePath - its the only one that supports SAN boot.

- Make sure you have plenty of memory - you definately don't want to be paging/swapping to a SAN device if you can help it.

- I'd consider keeping one local HDD anyway to use as a dump disk - I wouldn't want to be relying on access to the SAN to write a dump - there no point in mirroring a dump area so you wouldn't need MirrorDisk for that.

HTH

Duncan

[Mike Smith_33]

I thank you all for your replies. It is as I suspected, HP-UX can boot from the SAN. I especially liked the info on Securepath as well.

[Leif Halvarsson_2]

Hi,
Yes, it is possible to boot from SAN and, you don't need to buy any internal disks.

To get redundancy for the boot path, you need Secure Path 3D or, 3E. And, here may be a problem, I have never managed booting from SAN with Secure Path installed.

Single Path boot from SAN works without problem but, is for some reason not supported by HP.

[Mike Smith_33]

I believe I have enough information to move forward. Thanks to all.