Re: Boot AIVX from EMC Clariion

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Date: Fri, 17 Sep 2004 22:10:33 +0200

> We have several p670's that are SAN Attached to an EMC Clariion. We
> are dicussing High Availability options. The two that are on the table
> are HACMP and doing a SAN boot. With the SAN boot we would just point
> a new server to the LUN or if corruption then piont to a copied LUN.
> So I was wondering if anyone knew of about booting AIX5.1/5.2 from an
> EMC Clariion. I know it is supported but I was wondering what the real
> world implementation required.

Booting from a SAN is supported on AIX and we succeeded doing this with
an EMC's SYMMETRIX (high-end storage system from EMC) on a p670
partition. This partition is a production environment and is up and
running for several months without any trouble.

I don't know if this might help doing the same on an EMC Clariion, but
here are some tips :

- Of course, you need to ensure that the FC adapter properly sees the
SAN disk before attempting the installation. You should be able to check
that from the SMS menu, by selecting SAN devices for boot. If SMS don't
see your disk before installation, so the installation process won't.

- When installing AIX (from NIM or a CDROM), you MUST install the
filesets relevant to the EMC disk at the same time, by selecting them as
extra filesets to install. For Symmetrix disks, the filesets should be
Symm.*. I don't know the corresponding fileset for the Clariion. With
Symmetrix, if you fail to install those filesets, AIX will hang while
booting. (I don't remember the error code, but if you have time for
that, try and boot in maintenance mode and access the rootvg located on
the SAN disk, you will notice that hdisk0 is Defined and an extra disk
is Available, probably causing the boot to fail).

- For no good reason, with a Symmetrix, you MUST have 2 SAN disks
available when installing and booting. The second disk don't need to
have a boot record, a mirror of hd5 or even to be in rootvg. You can use
this extra disk in whatever way appropriate to you, including creating
another vg or leaving it unused, but whatever you do, this extra disk
MUST be present every time you boot your partition. This is documented
in an EMC technical note, where EMC say this is an IBM issue. IBM wasn't
able to provide a PTF for this "APAR", so I suppose they think this is
an EMC issue :-(

'Hope this help.

Feel free to ask for more.

        Nicolas.

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