Call me a geek, but I think SAN (Storage Area Network) Booting is probably one of the coolest things there is. I’ve been working with it a lot lately, and the more I work with it, the more I like it…especially on NetApp storage! For those of you not familiar with SAN’s, it’s basically booting your computer off of a NetApp filer. That’s right….no hard drive is needed in your computer. What’s so cool about that? Think about it…you can load an operating system on a NetApp filer in Germany and boot off of it in the USA over iSCSI. Now, you probably wouldn’t want to do that, because the speed would be terrible right now…but the fact that you can is amazing. What’s even cooler is being able to use ndmp, Snapshots, etc. on the filer to further the reliability, scalability, etc.. If you boot off of the filer, all of your data is constantly backed up via NetApp Snapshot Technology. With Snapshots, you can backup and restore all of your data in an emergency situation in seconds. Seriously, Snapshots typically take less than one second to create and can be scheduled. What about ndmp? Well, I’ve been doing some experimenting…I have 2 clustered filers, one running Data ONTAP 7.0.3, and the other cluster runs Data ONTAP 7.1rc4. Well, after I boot off of the cluster running 7.0.3…what if I want to boot off of the other cluster? I simply ran ‘ndmpcopy -sa user:pwd -da user:pwd /vol/vol1 filer2:/vol/vol1′ and all of my data was copied to the other cluster in 2 minutes. Then, I just changed the HBA settings to see the other filer, and bam….booted Windows Server 2003 from the other cluster.
[tags]netapp, ontap, san, sanboot, boot, iscsi, snapshot, ndmp[/tags]
Nice!!! On Demand what???
IBM’s solution worked great too — I just never had much of a chance to work with SAN booting at IBM.
Speaking of SAN boot, NetApp engineering in RTP has a huge server farm booting off iSCSI. We’re brining a few engineers to Sunnyvale for a BayLISA meeting to talk about it, and will be featuring this in the March issue of Tech OnTap. If you want more details, check out the event info or drop me a note.
http://www.mollyguard.com/event/25445107
1.SAN boot is definitely cool thing.
2.Some criticism: as far as I know, the iSCSI boot is possible only with special iSCSI HBA cards, not via the regular GBE network port. Fix me if I’m wrong.
Also you mix 2 different things – ndmp can run only against NAS filer and iSCSI/SAN boot can be done only from raw SCSI device. Fix me if I’m wrong again.
Thanks for the comments Leon — this is exactly what I was hoping for with this blog! Unfortunately, I’m a FCP guy, so my tests above were with QLogic 2462 HBA’s…but as far as iSCSI, I believe you’re correct in that you need an iSCSI HBA card. The reason is that the MS iSCSI Software Initiator is obviously not running at boot time. Good catch — I should’ve mentioned this before… What I was saying about ndmp is that you can create LUNs inside a volume on the filer and use ndmpcopy (on the filer) to copy the contents (at a volume level) to another filer. This works amazingly fast. Then, you just reconfigure your FCP HBA’s to point to the new WWPN and off you go.