[TriLUG] installing and booting from fibre

[Andrew Ball]

Has anyone had any success installing SLES or RHEL (or any Linux with
a 2.6 kernel) to a fibre logical volume?

I've been trying the following setup with RHEL 4 and SLES 10 betas
without any luck:

(1) IBM FAStT 700 fibre storage array controller + 1 expansion cabinet
(2) One logical volume on the storage array set up with RAID 5
(3) An IBM HS20 8843 blade with a qlogic ql2312 HBA.  This is a 2Gbps
dual-port HBA.  I can get RHEL 4 to install with all sorts of I/O
errors if I only map one of the ports to the logical volume.

I see all sorts of strange behavior when I disable the planar SCSI
adapter on the blade and try to deploy RHEL or SLES to the logical
volume.  First off, I see IO errors for sdb,sdc,sdd, and sde [if I
only map the first port on the HBA, otherwise I see even more].

Does anyone know why I would see these errors?  Does it have something
to do with the RAID-5 slice of the array's being made up of 5 drives?
I thought hardware RAID was supposed to abstract the array, so that I
would only see sda, not sd{a,b,c,d,e}.

Another thing that someone suggested was to configure multipathing.
I tried the qlremote utility on RHEL 4, but it died and complained
that it couldn't find any support HBA's with an odd out of memory
error.

Any help just understanding what I'm dealing with would be much appreciated.

Thanks!
Andrew
-- 
=======================
Andrew D. Ball
anball at gmail.com
http://filebox.vt.edu/~anball1/
"Festina lente" $\approx$ "Make haste slowly"
    -- Caesar Augustus