SAN booting using virtual engines such as IBM SAN Volume Controller would not be an easy task, especially if you have ESS, FAStT and Symmtrix under SVC, because its true mutipathing scheme. You need to restrict to the only one path for booting time and reenable the multipath afterward. You may think twice if this would be a possibility in the future. SAN routing also is coming very soon and that would be another issue if you want to consolidate all booting resources for multiple location.
Also, with advanced virtual I/O server on new pSeries, POWER5 with AIX 5.3, your zoning would be another challenge for booting because multiple LPAR hosts can be sharing the same HBAs and I don't know how SAN switch would take them with same World Wide names. Just a few more thoughts on planning. Thanks. Jin Bae Chi (Gus) System Administrator Data Center, CSCC 614-287-5270 614-287-5488 Fax [EMAIL PROTECTED] >>> [EMAIL PROTECTED] 1/21/2005 8:15:52 AM >>> Hi Mike, Booting a pSeries from SAN poses no problems. I've booted pSeries from ESS, FAStT and EMC Symmetrix without problems (all were AIX 5.x systems). Richard. Mike <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <[email protected]> 21-01-2005 13:59 Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" To: [email protected] cc: Subject: Re: SAN Booting On Fri, 21 Jan 2005, Svetoslav Tolev might have said: > Hi. > Some years ago (I think 2) I make a tests to boot Windows 2000 from ESS. > The configuration was as follow: > - IBM eServer xSeries 440 > - Windows 2000 Advanced Server (machines was with 4 CPU/8 GB RAM) > - QLogic 2300 adapter (IBM FC2-133 Host Adapter) > > The tests are successful, but there are some problems: > 1. IBM Doesn't support boot for xSeries (Intel based servers) from SAN, > but the Qlogic does > 2. There are some problems with updating SDD drivers (because I want to > use 2 paths to ESS for redundancy) > 3. As the result test was successful, but the customer agrees to me that > unsupported solution for production environment is bad idea. That's good data. I'm trying to convince my/our windows admin to move to san booting. We have some IBM xseries and some dell. Does anyone know about booting pseries from san? Mike
