Boot server from SAN...???

[Highland]

Has anyone ever set-up an NT Server to boot from a SAN...??? We are going to be installing a SAN shortly and in terms of contingency see the ability to fully start some of our critical servers from the SAN as a bonus....but is it possible....???!!!

 

[ssay]

yes it is possible. We have EMC Symm and the facility is available. Although we are not using this option, since it means downtime. But if you are installing a new server it is worth doing so.

 

[Highland]

Thanks ssay, can you give any more background....??? How does it work...??? How does the server "know" what boot image to read...??? Is the complete OS read from the SAN image.....loads of questions actually....!!!

Basically we are about to tender for our "SAN" and it would be useful to have some background info on this particular process before listening to salesmen...???!!!

Any info appreciated....

 

[ssay]

you need to allocate a LUN on your SAN for NT OS loader. You will need to have HBA - Host Bus Adaptors - Fibre Cards that have the bios capablities to boot bios - similar to diskless PCs that need to boot to the network using remote boot facility on the NIC.

Other than that it should be total host redundancy, where if the hosts die, you just replace a clone and power up using the boot disk.

Simple, but needs a bit of config on the SAN and a bit of config on the NT box during the installation.

 

[Highland]

Thanks ssay, exactly the config we are looking for...

One final point, do you know how shares, drivers and registry are controlled, are these written directly to the image on the SAN, or does the image need to be re-written if there are any changes....???

 

[ssay]

everything as normal aprt from that the OS its on SAN, rather than local drive.