san boot
Looking for opinions, pros/cons, on booting from a san using solaris on sparc hardware.I know it can be done but am not seeing the benefits as compared to say a billy box.
We routinely boot windows off of a san for hardware independence. If we need to upgrade/downgrade/replace hardware we just shut it down, swap the hba's and boot again.Go through hardware discovery, reboot again and you are good to go.
That doesn't work for solaris at all unless the hardware is exactly the same. The only way I've found to switch hardware is to boot to another disk on new hardware, mount the original boot disk, recconfigure /dev and /devices with devfsadm, and then boot the new hardware.It works but requires more hardware, planning, and time.
So what are the benefits of boot from san? Performance? Easier storage management?Other?
[862 byte] By [
javelina] at [2007-11-25 23:38:54]
# 1
Going by past history, SAN booting is not a very good idea. We've had 20-30 boxes hanging in "la-la land" after a SAN firmware upgrade in the past. Needless to say it took a while to recover them.
It seems like a reasonable idea to have OS booting off (and mirrored) local disks and then have the rest of your apps data on the SAN.
Since most of the sun hardware do ship with 2 disks of substantial size, it would be quite reasonable to leverage them.
# 2
SAN boot reduces the costs and complexity of server administration.Instead of chasing every failing spindle in every server, provide 2 paths to a RAID LUN in the fabric, and forget about the boot device.SAN boot design must match server availability requirements!!M
# 3
booting from san, could be a good method for migration...
we have several e25k, sometimes we would like to migrate from one platform to another, maybe in remote sites.
It makes sense to have a disksuite mirror face in the san, detach it and rezonify it to another server, then boot it with all the vx luns...
before this procedure, lots of IT organizations, when migrating, installed all of the products again in another machine, then tuned, then copied the data... it could take for weeks/months.
a san migration is difficult in some ways, but it can be done in a day.
