On Mon, 2009-07-20 at 22:17 +0300, Pasi Kärkkäinen wrote: > 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 :-)
So Pasi, have you actually used any of the above in production with RHEL5? We actually managed to get iBFT working with out IBM blades with RHEL5 but found it somewhat flaky/unreliable. We had the occasional "No Boot Device", had difficulty getting multipath to work with iBFT, and had the system fail to boot after a kernel upgrade. After two or three such problems we threw in the towel and went with iSCSI HBA's just as we always used with RHEL4. Perhaps support has improved over time and we need to try again (our testing was either with 5.1 or 5.2, can't remember for sure) but our iBFT experience at the time was certainly not very favorable. Thanks, Tom _______________________________________________ rhelv5-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
