SAN boot experiences

[CITEC HP TEAM]

I'd be interested to know peoples experience in booting from SAN devices.

problems/concerns

Our opinion has to been avoid it at all costs as it can make the system less reliable for little gain. However utilising SAN features like EMC business copies and SRDF can be an advantage when designing site DR.

Has anyone successfully implemented SAN boot for DR purposes and again what are your experiences positive and negative.

We use switched fabric, EMC arrays, PCI 2GB fibre cards, Itanium/PA-RISC hardware running HP-UX 11.23 or 11.11.

[Shaikh Imran · Accepted solution]

Hi,
Just refer the following thread from some
experts like Mark Grant,Uwe Zessin,etc..,

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?admit=716493758+1089180014923+28353475&threadId=602789

Regards,

[Michael Tully]

We don't have any SAN boot LUN's, as we believe that they add an additional layer of complexity and point of failure. We have all production systems with internal mirrored disks. As far as SRDF goes we have

siteA R1 LUN's -- > siteB R2 LUN's --> BCV
if we want to replicate a system, we simply use a set of BCV LUN's from siteB and mount them onto a system at siteB
What we do have is a like-for-like servers at both sites in order for DR. We also try to keep the patches at both ends as up to date as we can. A designated production server, will fail-over to a designated development server in opposiet site.

All appplications and database reside on R1 disk, so if we fail over all applications etc are on the symm disk.