Installing Solaris on FC storage with MPxIO

This evening I got another IBM Blade server HS20 with FC HBA. I wanted to install Solaris on it and suddenly I realized that it is a great opportunity to test install/boot from FC storage. Fortunately I had a DS4300 storage array connected to the system with some spare space left on one of its volume groups. I tried that kind of installation about a year ago, but until new boot was integrated into Solaris booting from FC HBA had little chances to success.

So I booted the Blade from the CDROM and it readily presented the FC disk as a choice for the installation. It worth noting that DS4300 is connected via two controllers, so MPxIO merged two hardware nodes into one virtual. This very long name c5t600A0B800019D82F000014804368A7C0d0 is the name of the disk based on its GUID rather then on WWPN. DS4300 is an Active/Standby box, however MPxIO supports these kind of controller (Engenio-based) pretty well. So the installation went ahead and I went to drink tea. 10 minutes later it was over and after reboot I enabled the BIOS on QLogic FC HBA card and set the FC node and LUN to boot from. That's was it. Everything just played happily along.

Here it is after the reboot:

# uname -a
SunOS b7 5.11 snv_25 i86pc i386 i86pc

And look where the root filesystem is mounted -

# df -h /
Filesystem              size   used  avail capacity  Mounted on
/dev/dsk/c5t600A0B800019D82F000014804368A7C0d0s0
                        14G   2.7G    11G    20%    /

Now, what constitutes that virtual disk

# luxadm disp /dev/rdsk/c5t600A0B800019D82F000014804368A7C0d0s2
DEVICE PROPERTIES for disk: /dev/rdsk/c5t600A0B800019D82F000014804368A7C0d0s2
  Vendor:               IBM
  Product ID:           1722-600
  Revision:             0520
  Serial Num:           1T53176260
  Unformatted capacity: 16384.000 MBytes
  Write Cache:          Enabled
  Read Cache:           Enabled
    Minimum prefetch:   0x100
    Maximum prefetch:   0x100
  Device Type:          Disk device
  Path(s):

  /dev/rdsk/c5t600A0B800019D82F000014804368A7C0d0s2
  /devices/scsi_vhci/disk@g600a0b800019d82f000014804368a7c0:c,raw
   Controller           /dev/cfg/c3
    Device Address              200600a0b819d830,0
    Host controller port WWN    2100000d6050ec96
    Class                       primary
    State                       ONLINE
   Controller           /dev/cfg/c3
    Device Address              200700a0b819d830,0
    Host controller port WWN    2100000d6050ec96
    Class                       secondary
    State                       STANDBY

Overall impression: very smooth integration of FC multipathing into boot subsystem. Many thanks to all the Sun' engineers involved with this framework.

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