On Thu, Jul 16, 2009 at 02:55:11PM -0400, Ugo Bellavance wrote: > Hi, > > I have blade servers that I'd like to boot directly on an iSCSI > drive. Is it possible on RHEL5? Will it be possible in RHEL6? > > I saw this: http://iscsi-init.sourceforge.net/HOWTO.html. Would that be > a solution? >
That seems to be a bit old howto.. RHEL5 supports iBFT (iSCSI Boot Firmware Table) for easy boot-from-SAN configurations using Linux software iSCSI initiator (open-iscsi). Basicly you need a server with iBFT capable firmware (=BIOS) or gPXE (it has iBFT support nowadays), or emBoot (commercial iBFT PXE solution). At least IBM Blades have iBFT-capable software iSCSI initiator built into the BIOS (using the standard onboard Broadcom NICs). You configure the boot LUN from the BIOS, and then the BIOS/firmware does the int13h boot emulation to load grub/bootloader from the iSCSI LUN. Linux kernel (or RHEL5 anaconda installer) then reads the root LUN iSCSI configuration from iBFT table from memory, and connects to the iSCSI LUN automatically. If your server/BIOS/firmware doesn't have built-in iBFT support you can use gPXE or emBoot. There are some other solutions aswell.. iBFT is the standard way to go. Even Microsoft supports iBFT :-) Hopefully that helps. -- Pasi _______________________________________________ rhelv5-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
