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
jbaechi AT cscc DOT edu


>>> RvanDenzel AT SLTN DOT NL 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 <mikee AT MIKEE.ATH DOT CX>
Sent by: "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager" <ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU>
21-01-2005 13:59
Please respond to "ADSM: Dist Stor Manager"

        To:     ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
        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