Boot from SAN

bhart50 · 01-08-2007, 04:03 PM

I have been using SUSE 9 on HP blades and booting from SAN for a while now. I need to install Redhat AS 3.0 to boot from SAN on one of these blades and cannot get Anaconda to see the SAN disk. I am using a Qlogic QLA2340 HBA. Has anyone ever set up Redhat to book from SAN? If so could you tell me how to do it or direct me to a howto.

MensaWater · 01-09-2007, 01:33 PM

I know RedHat AS 3 will run the Qlogic (qla2300) drivers because we use them here for SAN. However we use Dell with internal PERC (RAID) adapaters and drives to boot from internal storage. The SAN storage is for the DB filesystems we have running Oracle RAC so I can't tell you how to make it boot from a SAN drive.

Perhaps looking at QLogic's site will help?

You also don't mention the SAN setup you're using. They have EMC specific stuff for Clariion arrays.

Have a look at:
http://support.qlogic.com/support/oe...emname=QLA2340

bhart50 · 01-10-2007, 02:28 PM

We have an HP EVA 5000 and an IBM SVC. As I said I have been using boot from SAN with Suse SLES 9 for a while now so I'm pretty sure that the SAN is configured correctly. I believe the problem is that Redhat is not loading the ql2300 driver, and I'm not sure where to get one to load manually or how to load it.

MensaWater · 01-10-2007, 03:10 PM

Well we did it from a Dell deployment CD so I don't know if it was native to the RH AS 3 or something that came in from the deployment CD.

Just found the following by doing a Google search:
http://support.qlogic.com/support/os...id=253&osid=65

Under the 2.4 kernel there is information about booting from SAN (IA64 and AMD shown separately). So the link from one of those is:
http://download.qlogic.com/drivers/4...it_RedHat.html

It tells you how to dd in the driver for boot time on RHAS 3 (which has the 2.4 kernel). The drivers are available at the Qlogic site.

bhart50 · 01-12-2007, 01:09 PM

This driver did not work. When it asks me for the driver disk I put it in and it says there are no applicable drivers on this disk.

During Post it displays a banner that says this is a HBA2312 card. That card is not listed on the Qlogic site. It may be I have to get the driver from HP but I don't see anything on their site for installation driver disks.

MensaWater · 01-12-2007, 01:26 PM

The QLA2300 driver does show it as a QLA2312 card even though its a 2340. Not sure why that is but I'd noticed that when we first installed them a year or so ago. So I don't think that's the issue.

When you say it found no applicable drivers on disk - did you burn the driver to a CD and use that at the dd point?

bhart50 · 01-13-2007, 05:54 AM

I downloaded the dd-kit-RHEL3-U7-i386.tgz file and decompressed it.
Inside was an ISO from which I created a CD-ROM. When it asked for the driver disk I put that CD-ROM in the drive. I have to use the 32 bit version because the app we're installing does not support 64 bit.

MensaWater · 01-13-2007, 09:34 AM

Try just mounting the CD you burned (say as /mnt) on another system to see if you can actually read what's on it. Maybe the burn didn't work correctly.

Since I didn't install the driver that way I can't really offer any guidance. If I think of it when next in the office I'll try to check out the deployment CD I'd mentioned to see if it has any sort of syntax for the dd and drivers on that CD itself.