HP P6000 Continuous Access Implementation Guide (T3680-96431, August 2012)

5 Planning the solution
This chapter describes general design considerations for the different operating systems, applications,
and storage management components that you can use when planning a remote replication solution.
Operating system considerations
This section describes the operating systems supported in remote replication solutions. It also
describes the operating system capabilities that are available in an HP P6000 Continuous Access
environment.
NOTE: These capabilities are not always available in non–HP P6000 Continuous Access
environments.
Supported operating systems
The ability for HP P6000 Continuous Access to work with an operating system is determined by
the operating system support documents posted on the SPOCK website at http://www.hp.com/
storage/spock
If an operating system is supported with a particular array model and controller software version,
then HP P6000 Continuous Access is supported with that operating system.
Operating system capabilities
This section describes two operating system capabilities that are available in an HP P6000
Continuous Access solution: boot from SAN and bootless failover.
Boot from SAN
With HP P6000 Continuous Access, you can replicate boot disks to a remote array and use them
to recover the host and applications. Refer to the OS-specific documentation on the SPOCK website
for operating systems that support boot from SAN and boot disk failover.
IMPORTANT: Do not use HP P6000 Continuous Access to replicate swap files.
Bootless failover
Bootless failover allows destination servers to find the new source (after failover of the storage)
without rebooting the server. This capability also includes the fail back to the original source without
rebooting.
NOTE: For any operating system you use, refer to the OS-specific documentation on the SPOCK
website to ensure that you use compatible versions of multipath drivers and HBAs. Each boot disk
must be in its own DR group.
50 Planning the solution