User guide

96 Implementing Cisco InfiniBand on IBM BladeCenter
6.1 Benefits of booting from high-speed InfiniBand
The BoIB feature on the IBM BladeCenter blade servers provides high availability, reduces
cabling complexity, minimizes the downtime windows and helps consolidate the IT
infrastructure. The BoIB feature allows for deployment of diskless servers and exploit the10
Gbps bandwidth available with BC-H solution.
The benefits include:
򐂰 Cost reduction
The BladeCenter architecture helps cut the equipment costs by reducing the number of
moving parts such as fans, power supply, and internal disk drives when compared with the
standalone servers. BladeCenter provides the capability to share the resources such as
power, cooling, cabling, IO paths among all the servers with in the chassis and facilitates
centralized management.
򐂰 High availability
The system downtime is greatly minimized in situations where a critical component such
as a processor, memory or the system planar fails and needs to be replaced. The system
administrator only needs to swap the hardware with similar hardware and install the same
HCA (InfiniBand host channel adapter) on the blade server thus making the system
quickly available for production.
򐂰 Centralized storage management
The solution eliminates any need for local storage. The boot LUN is located on a RAID
capable storage subsystem thus providing high availability in case of a failure of one of the
physical disks.
6.2 Blade booting from a SAN
The following sections illustrates the step-by-step procedure for implementing boot from SAN
using the HS21 blade server attached DS4700 storage over high-speed InfiniBand fabric
using the SFS3012 FC Gateway device.
The sections that we cover here are:
򐂰 6.2.1, “Pre-configuration checklist” on page 97
򐂰 6.2.2, “Verifying and installing HCA firmware” on page 97
򐂰 6.2.3, “Configuring the SRP host on the SFS 3012 FC gateway” on page 98
򐂰 6.2.4, “Configuring Fibre Channel SAN” on page 102
򐂰 6.2.5, “Configuring storage” on page 104
򐂰 6.2.6, “Discovering storage” on page 105
򐂰 6.2.7, “Configuring the gateway port and LUN access” on page 105
򐂰 6.2.8, “Port masking” on page 106
򐂰 6.2.9, “Discovering the boot LUN” on page 109