Installin win 2k3 on SAN disk

[nsantos]

Hello,

We have one DL380G5 (diskless) with a Optic Fiber board (Emulex LPe1550), and a SAN (clarion CX300). We've already configured a disk (RAID-5) to use with the server.

The problem is that the disk is recognized at boot time (in the emulex status) but not on the windows 2003 server installation. We have to press F6 to load the drivers (SCI, RAID) but the server has no floppy drive.

Anyone has any suggestion on how we can install win server 2k3 this way???

Thanks in advance.

[Ivan Ferreira]

You can try with an USB floppy disk.
You can use a Remote Installation Server.

I really think that the operating system should be in the internal disks. (Unless replication is planned). You will have less problems if you need to recover the server.

See also:

http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B305547&x=9&y=10
http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb%3Ben-us%3B329707&x=17&y=19
http://www.netapp.com/library/tr/3376.pdf

[Rune J. Winje]

I concur. Buying a local disk would be a good idea in this case. (Unless Windows 2003 R2 should detect more controllers - including this controller/SAN combination in the boot).

Be aware that although there are some benefits to booting from SAN, (easy administration/backup/redeployment) having the OS disk there is a mixed bag.

In general the performance will hurt when the pagefile.sys is on SAN compared to local disks.

If planning cluster use you also need a hotfix if you will use only one controller for both the boot disk and cluster disks.


Cheers,
Rune