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

[Jeffrey Brown]

Jim, What distribution/version of Linux are you using? I've tried and
failed to hook-up a QLogic 2200 fibre-channel card to our fabric using
RedHat 7.3 & RedHat 8.0. QLogic says that's it's a problem w/ our SCSI
mid-layer, their driver works fine, and RedHat says those drivers are
only supported with Advanced Server 2.1 or RedHat Enterprise Linux. Also
what type of fibre channel cards are you using your Linux boxes?
Thanks.

>>> ockers at ockers.net 7/17/2003 11:57:13 AM >>>
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/ 
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