Booting/Installing a PE2950 from EMC SAN disk

[Mukarram Syed]

Thanks for the suggestions.
It will be a few days or maybe a week or two until I try this however I have
some questions on your response:

- enter the HBA BIOS during post and then enable BIOS
---- where should I do this part, not very clear.  When the system boots
up, I need to go into the HBA BIOS and enable BIOS, how?

- you should see the available LUN created and select it as a boot device
---- where should I do this, is this in the HBA BIOS? Or in the system BIOS?

How should I configure my ks.cfg file so that anaconda will automagically
install OS on the SAN drive? 

Thanks

-Mukarram.

-----Original Message-----
From: Bahadir Kiziltan [mailto:bahadir.kiziltan at gmail.com] 
Sent: Saturday, August 25, 2007 12:05 PM
To: Mukarram Syed
Cc: linux-poweredge at dell.com
Subject: Re: Booting/Installing a PE2950 from EMC SAN disk

Hi,

I assume that you have only one HBA and your server is connected to a
clariion array via SAN switch.

- first create a zone covering wwn_HBA and wwn_SPAx then activate the zone.
- on navisphere gui, manually register the host via connectivity status
window
- create a LUN to be used for OS installation (should be owned by SPA)
- create a storage group
- put manually registered host and LUN into the storage group created
- enter the HBA BIOS during post and then enable BIOS
- you should see the available LUN created and select it as a boot device

After that, it's a regular OS installation. RHEL supports emulex HBAs
and provides the required drivers out-of-the-box. Installer represents
the LUN as sda. Remember installing kernel-devel package. Finally,
install navisphere software.

Then activate the other zone covering wwn_HBA and wwn_SPBx.

I have boot-from-SAN servers with dual HBAs in production environment.
I find qlogic HBAs and drivers much more flexible than emulex as they
provide driver based HBA failover capabilities especially for Linux
environment.

Bahadir.

On 8/23/07, Mukarram Syed <muksyed at stanford.edu> wrote:
>
>
>
>
> Hi,
>
> Any suggestions would be appreciated on this Subject of Installing/Booting
a
> PE2950 from EMC SAN disk:
>
>
>
> I have been using Kickstart to install RedHat Linux on local disks and
> booting from them.  But a requirement arose in our department to install
> Linux on a SAN disk which I have never done before.
>
> We will be using Emulex Card with lpfc drivers.  How could one incorporate
> loading the lpfc driver upon bootup so that it could recognize the SAN
disk
> and install OS on this.  Should I rebuild the kernel or the initrd file to
> load the lpfc drivers?  If yes, how?
>
> Which partitions will it use to install the OS (sda/sdb or something
else)?
>
>
>
> Please advice.
>
>
>
> I also posted this on the Kickstart mailing list, but did not get any
> response since my post.
>
>
>
> Thanks Much in advance
>
>
>
> -Mukarram.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> Mukarram Syed
>
> Unix Systems Administrator,
>
> Administrative Services, Stanford University
>
> 340 Panama Street,
>
> Godzilla Building,
>
> Stanford, CA 94305 MC 2226.
>
> Phone: 650-736-7647
>
> Cell: 408-480-8841
>
> Email: muksyed at stanford.edu
>
>
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