Cannot mount using LABEL when booting from SAN with qla2x00 driver

[B Cave]

A system that boots from SAN is failing if it tries to boot from a FC-attached SAN. Hardware: HP Blade server with a QLogic HBA (ISP2432-based). OS: Centos-5.4. Installation: via kickstart, including a qla.iso driver-disk. The post-install script installs hp_qla2x00src RPM (version 8.02.11). The initial installation adds an entry like "LABEL=/ / ext3 defaults 0 1" to /etc/fstab. Once the driver has been installed and a new initrd generated (during installation post-install), the server reboots and an error is received: "fsck.ext3: unable to resolve 'LABEL=/'". I get a prompt for root password, after which if i run "tune2fs -l /dev/sda1" it shows the correct label.

[Bharath_Pingali]

Hello B Cave,

I guessing CentOS 5.4 is similar to RHEL 5.4.
If thats true, the CentOS 5.4 should already have the latest Qlogic driver in the OS.
There shouldnt be a need fro installing one.

As you are doing a boot from SAN without using the driver, i am guessing that there is a Qlogic driver already present.

Let me know if this makes sense.

-Thank You
Bharath

[B Cave]

CentOS is exactly the same codebase as RHEL. However, the RHEL / CentOS driver is not multipath aware, so in order to boot from SAN attached to QLA and still support redundancy, the HP / QLogic driver is needed.

RHEL / CentOS qla2xxx driver shows:
/dev/sda1
/dev/sdb2
/dev/sdb3
/dev/sdb4

However, after loading QLogic / HP driver (hp_qla2x00src rpm compiled against kernel source and added into initrd as well as /lib/modules), fdisk only shows /dev/sda (when vdisk is presented on LUN1).

I would prefer to use vendor-based driver (i.e hp) over the native CentOS driver + multipath driver (the centos multipath driver maps differently, using /dev/mapper).