Poll question: Do you need to control the boot path at the path level?

[marie-noelle jeanson]

Hi,

Please help HP provide you the best tools by answering thie question below:

In a future HP-UX release, failover will be automatic between all available paths to a device. In particular, the boot path will failover automatically when a failure is detected on the active boot path. So my question is:
When selecting a boot device, is it sufficient to identify the device you want to boot from or is it important for you to control which exact path is being used as boot path?

If control of a specific path is important to you, can you tell me why? (we need to understand the use cases for it, otherwise we may not offer that control).

Thanks,

Marie.

[IT_2007]

It would be good to have control for which path we need to boot off. Because most of the big companies going for virtualization and this control would help to resolve boot isssue.

If it is a single machine with no virtual servers, then you may need control of it.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Marie,

I'd like the exact path. As an administrator, I don't want it trying every disk. I want to be able to configure it to try or NOT try certain disks to avoid possible problems.

SEP

[A. Clay Stephenson]

My preference would be to specify the path. Automatic discovery would be ok as long as it can be turned off and user-specified paths are then allowed. It is very common, especially in Sandbox/lab/development environments, to have multiple boot disks with different OS versions so that "boot pri" might boot one OS version and "boot alt" might boot another. The ability to selectively boot from alternate devices is important in those environments.

For most production machines the ability to automatically boot from an alternate is the primary is not available is a good thing although in most environments booting is a very rare event. My concern is that the very users that you are trying to assist by automatic fail over boot are the very ones who will be hurt the most because after the primary fails they will continue fat, dumb, and happy, to boot from the alternate until that too fails rather than immediately replacing the failed disk.