Swap Boot Disks Between Systems -- License Issues?

[Alzhy]

We've two N-Class servers -- same boot disk paths but one has 4 CPU's and the other has 2 CPU's.. On 1 server with 2 CPU's, we have the disks mirrored and we're licensed for just about everything except of course tools which depend on CPU count. What will happen if I move over the internal disks to the server (same N-Class) but have 4 CPU's.. I know that on Sun - software is dependent on HostID.. would this be a problem considering that our codewords was for the server with 2 CPU's? Would I expect difficulty booting off these disks considering that the paths are the same?

[Steven E. Protter]

The boot images might not like the change, but I don't think there are license issues with the OS.

Oracle's current license scheme costs more per CPU, so if you did that with a whole Oracle system, you might have to cough up some bucks. Lots of them.

SEP

[Sridhar Bhaskarla]

Hi,

If the license is based on HostId, sure you will have to get new licenses. If the licenses are dependent on the number of CPUs, I don't think you will need to get new ones but will have to pay for the extra CPUs. I don't believe that vendors would hardcode the number of CPUs in their license code.

-Sri

[Alzhy]

The products with codewords in question are just MirrorDisk, OJFS and GlancePlus. As I've mentioned previusly, the boot disks are mirrored on the old server -- on the new server, its existing boot disks have the same HW/Paths. Should I just take the 2nd disk on my old server and try it out on the new server? Will MirrorDisk/UX complain about the other disk?

Also, what would be the best way to clone a disk? So an image of HPUX 11i can be "propagated".. I am planning to "copy" my existing OS to another similarly sized disk and just boot off it on the new server... all our servers are configured similarly.. just the CPU counts are not the same...

[Michael Steele_2]

Some licenses are tracked by system id, uname -i. The system id resides upon the system board, is firmware installed and can only be changed by an HP CE and his SS_CONFIG utility.

[Sridhar Bhaskarla · Accepted solution]

Hi Nelson,

The products that you mentioned will not complain about the boot disk. Make sure you have licenses for those products before cloning the OS.

As long as you keep the disks in the same slots, you should not have any problem booting the other N-class. Only thing that you need to make sure is to have your auto file set to 'hpux -lq(;0)/stand/vmunix'. Search in the forums and you should be able to find numerous postings on setting/verifying mirrors.

However, the best and easy method without having to disturb anything is to use "Ignite/UX". You can get ignite ux from the following location. Prepare an ignite tape using make_tape_recovery and use it to restore the other system.

http://software.hp.com/products/IUX/download.html

/opt/ignite/bin/make_tape_recovery -v -I -x inc_entire=vg00 -a /dev/rmt/0m

should get your tape going. Also make sure you didn't hardcode the MAC addresses in /etc/rc.config.d/hp*conf files that set the speed of your lan cards at boottime. You don't need to mention the MAC addresses there.

-Sri