iSCSI Boot on IBM Bladecenter

[mrose1120istar]

hi all,

Were switching out environment to IBM Blades with 32GB of RAM and

built in iSCSI cards. With this, we are doing boot from iSCSI for the

ESX drive. anyone have experience with this? When I originally set it

up, I had did the install with just one card active, it went fine, and

on previous knowledge of fiber, I then activated the 2nd card, and it

ran fine for a few days.. Eventually the file system went read only.,

and I contacted Netapp. They sent some documentation which seemed ot

say to disable the 2nd card unless you will be booting from it. In

addition, I had to take the 2nd card's IP Address out completely to

ensure the errors don't come back.

Is this normal?

[BenConrad]

ahh, read-only COS filesystems while booting from SAN, I remember those days.

Seriously though, I had about 12 months of issues while booting from SAN with dual Qlogic iSCSI HBAs. Check out one of my posts from the past, it's got a lot of info in it and I think "tslighter" also has a fix. We moved away from iscsi-boot-from-san about 9 months ago and we've never looked back. There are ways to set the proper timeouts in COS but there is no guarantee that a qlogic driver update won't blow away your settings you carefully tested and approved...this happened to me as well.

Don't do it.

Ben

[CTurnerTX]

Ben,

What alternative did you settle on? Local storage for booting ESX, using FC? I think a PXE boot into ESX would be the bees knees.

Amazing what a few minutes of googling will do - I found PXE booting for installing ESX!

(found from )

Still would like to know what you settled on, Ben!

Message was edited by: CTurnerTX

Edit of my edit again: That wasn't what I wanted after all.. That lets you PXE boot to install ESX on local drives. Maybe this site: http://www.chriswolf.com/?p=182

Really would love to have a bladecenter full of HS21 XM's with no drives at all inside

[BenConrad]

We boot 100% of our ESX servers using a local Raid-1, we're doing this on blades and stand-alone servers. After we moved away from boot-from-san we never looked back. We don't mind having the 2 disks in each server. The pain of figuring out and debugging the proper settings for iSCSI boot-from-san was not worth the time. Making things worse, we couldn't be sure a future ESX update wouldn't change some of the boot-from-san settings that we 'got used to'.

Ben

[ablej · Accepted solution]

Have you installed the Netapp iSCSI ESX Host Utilities on each ESX server? I also believe I saw a Netapp Engineer mention in his blog to disable the second card when booting from SAN.

David Strebel

www.holy-vm.com

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[mrose1120istar]

actually it ended up being the 2nd card disabling

we've been running just fine on iSCSI boot since a couple days after this post now

[BenConrad]

great! Now you should start pulling path1 or path2 and see what happens to the COS.

Check out my thread here http://communities.vmware.com/thread/109496 and check out Tom Howarth's answers.

Ben