Booting Blades from a SAN

OK, so this is not the original first post I was going to make, however I just spent 3 hours for the second time in 6 months troubleshooting the exact same problem so I'm posting it here mainly for my benefit.

Our setup is an IBM BladeCenter with a combination of HS21 and HS21XM blades connected to an IBM DS3400 Fiber Channel SAN. We purchase our blades without drives and boot from the SAN. This works great once in production but has proved tricky to get into production (if you are like us and only do this every once in a while). I will list the steps below, however the tricky part that bit me again today is this: Once you have created your luns on the SAN and assigned them to your Blade our DS3400 (quietly) assigns a controller owner and preferred path. That controller owner setting must sync up with which HBA controller you have defined as the boot device. On our DS3400 screen that setting is under Modify/Change Logical Drive Ownership/Preferred Path. Without that setting the blade can see the drive, Windows setup can see the drive however it cannot write to it and strange 'unable to access disk' message occur.

I still have another blade to configure so I'll try and capture some screen prints and make a better how to post.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

There is nothing new under the sun

 Pretty sure my tombstone will read, " Here lies a man who was happy to let those around him do the hard work " From the Daring Fireball again ( https://daringfireball.net/linked/2020/11/30/the-paranoid-style ) comes a link to a Harper's article from 1964 that reads like it could have been written last month.  I've had a sense throughout this ordeal (Trump presidency, 2020, pandemic - take your pick) when it seems like we are in totally new ground of craziness that it must have felt this way before.  Not many facts to base that feeling on, just bits and pieces.  Tweets about how the country reacted to the Spanish Flu in regards to race relations, that sort of thing.  History is trending upwards, I do believe that to be true, I just have to keep the faith.  Anyway, thanks to Gruber for posting this link, it makes me think we might be fine after all. https://harpers.org The Paranoid Style in American Politics
Read more

From the Atlantic - Research Proves It: There’s No Such Thing as Noblesse Oblige

Lots of thought provoking stuff in there.   The most interesting part of the experiment, Piff said, came after, when players were asked to talk about what they had done to affect the game’s outcome. The obvious answer was that the fix was in and the rich player got lucky. But the rich players were almost twice as likely as the poor ones to talk about game strategy—how they’d earned their win. And so it goes in the world. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/04/does-wealth-rob-brain-compassion/618496/
Read more