Boot from SAN with HP QLogic QMH2462 & Windows 2003

By sjagger | Published: March 8, 2010

If you’ve found this you must be having all the difficulties I had to get boot from SAN working properly with the QLogic QMH2462 Mezzanine card for HP c7000. From what I have read the Emulex Mezzanine cards work fine out of the box, but they’re double the price!

You will need:

  1. Windows 2003 media
  2. nLite
  3. Boot from SAN QLogic drivers (download: 32bit / 64bit)
  4. MPIO

To install Windows 2003 you must load the QLogic Boot from SAN drivers to the Windows install. You can do this by either hitting F7 to load drivers during install, or by slipstreaming the drivers in to the Windows 2003 install.

But before we do that we must first setup the QLogic BIOS to prepare for boot from SAN. If you don’t have a local connection to the blade you will need to use the Java KVM iLO option to allow for ALT+Q within the browser. On booting your blade, hit CTRL+Q or ALT+Q to go in to the QLogic BIOS.

  • Select “Scan Fibre Channel Devices” should confirm WWN path(s) to your storage.
  • Select “Fibre Disk Utility” to select the storage you have already presented.
  • “Configuration Settings” holds “Selectable Boot Settings”. In there Enable Boot from SAN and select your bootable WWN paths (up to 4).
  • Enable the BIOS option in “Configuration Settings”.
  • “Select Adaptor” and do the same thing.
  • Save all settings.

We now know the storage is online and mapped to the bootable Mezzanine WWN. You should see a host WWN presented on your SAN switch and/or storage.

A good guide how to slipstream drivers with nLite can be found at komku.blogspot.com

Slipstream one of the drivers (32bit or 64bit) and burn to CD, then install Windows as normal.

When the Windows installation completes you will need to install/enable MPIO. More information can be found at Microsoft – Download SANSurfer from HP which will prep Windows 2003 and even 2008 for MPIO.

When installed run HP Systems Update to bring everything up to date.

Test failover.

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VMWare Ultimate Deployment Appliance

By sjagger | Published: March 7, 2010

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The Ultimate Deployment Appliance will help you deploy your servers or workstations. The goal of the project is to be able to fully deploy a computer by booting to PXE and choosing the prepared operating system template. Of course this is already possible, but as I discovered, it takes a lot of time to setup a service like this. This appliance will do it for you. Windows, Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu, Suse), Solaris X86 and VMWare ESX 2.x.x and 3.x.x are supported.

Connect your laptop to an uninstalled system with a network cross-cable, boot the server up with PXE and choose the operating system template you have prepared on your laptop. This appliance is geared towards totally unattended installations, so after choosing the template you can sit back and relax.

The appliance will mount the ISO files of your operating system install CD/DVD’s and import only a very small subset of the files required for PXE booting other clients. Installation files and packages are served by the appliance right from the ISO images (samba/nfs/http).

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VMmark Virtualisation Benchmarking

By sjagger | Published: March 6, 2010

Benchmark VMWare Deployments using the free VMmark Virtualisation tool from VMWare.

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Get an accurate measurement of application performance in virtualized environments with VMmark, the industry’s first virtualization benchmark for x86-based computers. VMmark enables equipment manufacturers, software vendors, system integrators and other organizations to:
  • Measure virtual machine performance accurately and reliably
  • Determine the performance of different hardware and virtualization platforms
  • Make appropriate hardware decisions for your virtual infrastructure
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