On Mon, Jul 20, 2009 at 03:36:06PM -0400, Tom Sightler wrote: > 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?
No, not in production.. unfortunately. Also using iSCSI HBA's :) then again using HBA's was decided before iBFT support existed.. > 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. > Yeah, iBFT is a pretty new thing, and I _think_ it was introduced in RHEL5.2. iirc it has been improved in 5.3. I haven't checked if there's new iBFT stuff in 5.4 beta. So yeah.. worth trying again. -- Pasi _______________________________________________ rhelv5-list mailing list [email protected] https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/rhelv5-list
