DL580G2/FCA2214/Linux RHEL AS3.4/SAN Boot

[Eric Buckner]

Does anyone have experience actually making this work?

I have 2 FCA2214's in the box. The Boot CD comes up and loads the drivers. It identifies sda,sdb,sdc, and sdd. sdc and sdd are alternate paths to sda and sdb. I force the install on sda and put GRUB on the MBR for sda.

Installation runs to completion without any errors. I switch out to alt-f2 to command line and there are not any partitions on any of the 4 disks. And when I reboot I get a GRUB Hard Disk error. The GRUB stuff is written to the boot record, but it's like it didn't do anything else on the drives.

Any ideas are greatly appreciated!

Thanks!
Eric

[Gopi Sekar]

just check the order of the luns assigned..

when linux boots up, it automatically assigns (regardless of how u designated it), the lowest numbered lun as sda, and next as sdb etc...

so if u have assigned 3 luns (3 for sda, 2 for sdb, 4 for sdc), then when linux boots up it automatically reassigns this as 2 for sda, 3 for sdb, 4 for sdc.

so the installation is actually would have done on lun no 2 instead of 3.

Regards,
Gopi

[Eric Buckner]

I finally got this to work. I ended up having to disconnect 1 of the FCA2214's from the fabric.

I am guessing that something about the redundant paths created this.

My question now is. How do I fix it? Is there some driver or software on Linux that allows for multipathing?

[Patrick Terlisten]

Hi,

you need SecurePath or MPIO. MPIO is only a filter-driver and you can´t use it if you need failover or load-balancing features.

SecurePath Reference Guide:
http://h200005.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00062077/c00062077.pdf

MPIO Overview
http://h18006.www1.hp.com/products/sanworks/multipathoptions/index.html

Regards,
Patrick