This one's complicated,at least to me.

I'm trying to get RHEL5.3 booting on an IBM Blade off a SAN disk, but it refuses.

Our storage is presented on LUN 1 as due to the IBM XIV SAN, we cannot use LUN 0 when presenting volumes. We believe that when the installer tries to configure the boot LUN, it expects to see it on LUN 0 but we can't use that. This leads to a problem where after installed Red Hat, it asks me to remove the CD and reboot, but doesn't load anything other than a cursor blinking at me on the monitor.

I currently can't change the LUN ID on the SAN, so I've been trying to amend things to get it to work with no joy. Can anyone help?

We can probably muddle through it on here, but your best and quickest solution would be to get IBM's help. Seriously, you're using their blades and SAN, and they do support RHEL as a 'supported' configuration. Their tech support (which you are paying handsomely for...), should be held accountable, if things aren't working.

Have a look at page 6 of the XIV Host Attach Guide: http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infoce...v/r2/index.jsp

Host Attachment Kit Publications -> Version 1.5.x -> Host System Attachment Guide for Linux
Or go directly to the doc

http://publib.boulder.ibm.com/infoce...32-0647-02.pdf

The step-by-step example shows booting RHEL 5.2 on an IBM blade with Qlogic HBA from a boot volume mapped as LUN 1 on an XIV.

So there should be no need to use LUN 0.

BTW, if you really wanted to, the XCLI will allow you to map LUN0

>> map_vol host=Blade_14 vol=boot_14 lun=0
Command executed successfully.

Cheers

I found the issue, the problem was that the SAN guy presented the disk as multipath for the OS install. Once it was presented down a single path, it installed perfectly.