White Paper

Installing the operating systems

Root partition on SAN has become popular with blade systems and virtualization technologies.

Multipath feature support for operating system installation partitions was introduced with the latest

operating system distributions. OS vendors have provided the feature for enabling high

availability for the installation partitions on the SAN.

To enable the high availability feature in RHEL and SLES operating system, complete the following

steps:

Enabling the Device Mapper multipath feature

Recommended configuration on RHEL operating system

Ensure that there are multiple paths to the LUNS before starting the installation process. If there is

only one path to the LUNS, Anaconda installs the operating system on the SCSI device even if

mpath is specified as a kernel parameter. Enabling multipath features for the installation partitions

on iSCSI SAN devices is supported in RHEL 5.3 and later.

1. Start the installation of the operating system.

2. Provide the parameter “linux mpath” to the kernel boot line.

Figure 27

3. To add the iSCSI devices to the installation, complete the following steps, else go to Step 4

a. Click Advanced storage configuration.