[ Thanks to An Anonymous Reader for
this link. ]
” A key requirement of today’s complex data center
environments is to be able to deliver mission-critical data
quickly, at any time, without interruptions or delays. Booting
servers from a storage area network (SAN) can provide significant
benefits in this kind of situation.“A server traditionally boots its operating system from an
internal hard disk, but this introduces a lot of effort when a
physical server goes down, including replacing the server,
reloading the operating system, reinstalling applications, and so
on. Having the operating system boot from SAN storage simplifies
this, because you only have to replace the server; your OS and
applications are saved on the SAN.“Booting from SAN can also simplify data center administration,
improve disaster tolerance, and reduce total cost of ownership
(TCO) through diskless servers.“In this article, I illustrate how to set up Linux to boot from
SAN storage, in this case the IBM System Storage DS8000 with the
Device-Mapper MultiPath (DMMP) feature to manage multiple paths. I
cover procedures for Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 4 and 5, and
SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 9 and 10.”