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Mar 04 2008

Follow Up #2: HP Blades iSCSI Boot SOME OS’s

Posted by: Aaron Delp in Follow Up, HP Blades, VMWare

This is an update to my previous articles here and here on this issue.

I now have confirmation from HP that the supported OS’s for iSCSI Boot on the Blades are RHEL (versions 4 & 5) and SUSE (versions 9 & 10). There is no Microsoft or VMWare support at this time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 4th, 2008 at 1:32 pm and is filed under Follow Up, HP Blades, VMWare.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

5 Responses to “Follow Up #2: HP Blades iSCSI Boot SOME OS’s”
  1. Kevi Foster says:
    March 7th, 2008 at 3:50 pm

    Son of a Nugget! I am supposed to get my setup today…. Time for me to smack some AE and SE heads!

  2. Aaron Delp says:
    March 7th, 2008 at 4:49 pm

    Kevi - Are you trying to boot Windows or VMWare? The support above is what I was told (but I wasn’t given access to the document) by one of my local HP SE’s. I would be happy to be wrong!! Please double check on your end and let me know what you find out. Thanks!

  3. Kevin Foster says:
    March 9th, 2008 at 7:22 pm

    I am trying to boot ESX via iSCSI. I currently do this using QLogic iSCSI HBAs on HP DL585’s. We wanted to explore the blade route so we began the discussion quite a while back. All along I have said, “boot ESX via iSCSI”… “boot ESX via iSCSI”… in every meeting.

    I will have more details come Monday. Right now it looks like you are spot on. You cannot boot ESX via iSCSI on the HP Blades.

  4. Graham Zulauf says:
    June 3rd, 2008 at 8:37 am

    Any updates on when VMware will support boot-from-iSCSI via the onboard NICs on the BL460c?

  5. Aaron Delp says:
    June 3rd, 2008 at 12:00 pm

    Hey Graham - Nothing official but here is the way I see it. I don’t see support for the iSCSI onboard coming any time soon, if ever. If I remember correctly the onboard iSCSI is a Broadcom chipset (keep me honest on that) and right now VMWare only supports Q-Logic for iSCSI boot. I haven’t heard of them adding any additional manufacturers (Intel, Broadcom, etc). Maybe with ESX 4.0 or whatever the next major release will be.

    Here is something else to think about. ESX doesn’t handle boot from iSCSI fail over well at all. If you lose a connection to the iSCSI boot LUN, you will usually crash. Check around on the VMWare forums for more information. I have come to the conclusion that I don’t recommend iSCSI boot of ESX for this reason and FC boot isn’t much better. We are having most of our customers just put the ESX OS on local hard drives and then use iSCSI, FC, or NFS to talk to VM’s residing on SAN storage. Thanks for your comment!

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