Originally posted by: nh4aix

Hi all...

I am hearing more about non-local boot options like SAN boot or LAN (NIM) boot, but is anyone really using them... are these techniques mainstream or just talk.

What are you using? Local (disks), SAN or LAN (NIM) Boot? And how many LPARs of each?

Thanks,
Joe
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

I have just started testing with SAN boot, and I'm very interested to know where other people are in the process.

-Tony R.

> What are you using? Local (disks), SAN or LAN (NIM)
> Boot? And how many LPARs of each?
>
> Thanks,
> Joe

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Originally posted by: pvaughan

I've used SAN boot on DS4500 storage before. It works very well. Our software vendor has cautioned us about using it, but they don't really have a good technical reason why.

One objection is that they're concerned paging will eat up your SAN bandwidth that could be better served with database transactions. Our servers do very little paging, so that's not an issue. And the other objection is that if we lose SAN connectivity the system is totally down. Of course if we lose SAN connectivity completely, the system will most likely be totally down anyway, though it may make diagnosing the problem a little more work.

There might be a problem with updating the device driver while running on a SAN boot device too. I'm looking at using NIM to get around some of that right now. I'm using NIM alt_disk_install (smitty nim_alt_clone really) to do an alt_disk_install phase 1, then doing a couple of phase 2 steps (removing EFixes, installing the new TL level, and replacing drivers), than closing the VG with a phase 3 step.

I've testing booting from NIM, but only to do installs, not for diskless servers.
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Originally posted by: SystemAdmin

This past week, one of our team members tested path failover with EMC PowerPath, and everything went very well.
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