[CLUE-Tech] RedHat Kickstart, with Oracle and EMC.

[Jim Ockers]

Jed,

> Anyway, I was reminded of the CLUE meeting where I asked the IBM folks
> what they knew about connecting commodity boxes running Linux to large
> disk arrays such as EMC. The indication was that there wasn't anything in
> the market right now for that -- thus, in my mind, presenting a barrier to
> the adoption of Linux servers.
> 
> Well, wouldn't you know, you can, in fact, hook a linux box up to an EMC:
> 
>   https://www.redhat.com/solutions/migration/isv_storage.html

We've done this with Dell servers running Linux in the past.  Well I've
only tried it once on an EMC array but we do use a SAN with Linux servers.
Our SAN controller is a XIOtech MAGNITUDE which we like because it's very
Linux friendly.

The EMC did work but it was hard to resize volumes.  (You can only increase
volume sizes anyway, never decrease them.)

> Having never worked with Kickstart, I'm also wondering how it reacts to
> custom kernels, as this is the mechanism I'm aware of by which you'd get
> Veritas VFS and a vendor-supplied driver module (for the fibre-channel
> controller) into a custom distro.

The SAN fiberchannel interface appears to be a SCSI controller.  The SAN
volume appears to be a SCSI disk.  It couldn't be simpler.  Most of the
popular fiberchannel controllers have at least a basic Linux driver.  If
you want the fancy multipath bonding failover stuff you have to have pretty
strong vendor support for Linux - that has been less forthcoming, but
it's on its way I'm sure.

IBM appears to have very strong Linux SAN support, as well.  If you can
stand dealing with the IBM channel etc. you should definitely consider
buying IBM Linux servers - they have been "in deep" with Linux for a
long time.  The IBM people you talked to may not have known what their 
Linux support options were.

Anyway your kickstart should work fine if the kernel has the driver for
your fiberchannel controller in it.

Hope this helps,
Jim

-- 
Jim Ockers, P.Eng. (ockers at ockers.net)
Contact info: please see http://www.ockers.net/