Sign in or 
Location: Oracle Wiki Discussion Forum
Discussion: Oracle VM concepts, need help: SAN, diskless Blade servers, FC Switch
Category:
Discussion Forum /
General Discussion
Share this
Showing 3 posts
rlomba |
Oracle VM concepts, need help: SAN, diskless Blade servers, FC Switch
Nov 5 2008, 5:18 PM EST
Hello, I'm looking for a white paper (or any documentation about basic concepts) explaining how to approach the installation of Oracle VM Server+agent, on diskless blade servers (e.g. HP), connected via FC to a shared storage array (e.g. netapp, EMC).A real case study/howto would be perfect. My problem is that I have no experience with this architecture, and I'd really appreciate someone to shed some light on how a diskless server has to be configured to boot from a storage array, and especially how is it possible to install it (CD? BIOS network configuration and mount of a LUN "exposed" on the SAN network? ....or what else?) My company is evaluating the possibility of putting up a small (but fully functional) architecture, SAN+FC switch+a couple of blades, but I'd like to have clear in my mind the main concepts, to be able to propose a correct architecture and being confident with the best practices to plan the installation/physically install/configure. Thank you in advance. Do you find this valuable?
Keyword tags:
blade
oraclevm
san
virtualization
vm
|
simon.haslam |
1. RE: Oracle VM concepts, need help: SAN, diskless Blade servers, FC Swi
Nov 7 2008, 12:41 PM EST
There's plenty of HP boot from SAN documentation here:http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/DocumentIndex.jsp?contentType=SupportManual&locale=en_US&docIndexId=179911&taskId=101&prodTypeId=12169&prodSeriesId=406734 In particular, "Booting Linux x86 from SAN" here: http://bizsupport.austin.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00166137/c00166137.pdf Page 12 talks about installing the OS - whilst it is talking about installing RHEL I would have thought you could get it to work with OVM with a bit of effort. Alternatively, I don't know if HP blades now have internal USB slot (like the DL3xx series) - if so, you could boot from a USB memory stick into the hypervisor and then start up the VMs on the SAN. This works very nicely indeed with VMware ESXi 3.5 (although of course isn't currently supported by Oracle...). Simon 1 out of 1 found this valuable. Do you? |
|
rlomba |
2. RE: Oracle VM concepts, need help: SAN, diskless Blade servers, FC Swi
Nov 8 2008, 3:11 PM EST
Thank you so much for the useful information. That's what I was needing, although it's not strictly speaking of Oracle VM... But at least it gives me some confidence, now I know that it is possible to do it... Even if it would be nice to hear that somebody successfully implemented a boot from SAN with Oracle VM... Before buying the hardware.I ask you a couple of further questions... Maybe you could help me with those too... - Let's say that I'll be able to setup Oracle VM booting from SAN etc etc on a 64 bits server. Will I be able to create "32 bits" VMs? - talking about network interfaces on the blade servers: how many do I need? I was thinking of one FC adapter for connectivity with the SAN, 1 100 Mbits card to be shared by the VMs running on the server, and finally another 100 Mbits card to be used for communications with the Oracle VM Manager Server... Is this configuration correct? Thank you again for your help, which is very much appreciated... Do you find this valuable? |
