Specifications

Boot From SAN (BFS) and 8Gb Fibre Channel Host Bus

Adapters (HBA)

If you are using a Fibre Channel HBA that is capable of 8Gb transfer speeds and you are using either

Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1 or earlier or SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES) 10 Service Pack (SP)

1 or earlier, you must install the HP driver kit, before installing the ProLiant Support Pack (PSP), that

you can download from the website:

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/storage/saninfrastructure/hba.html

The reason for this is that the Fibre Channel HBA drivers in PSP version 8.0 and earlier do not support

Fibre Channel HBAs that are capable of transfer speeds of 8Gb. If you fail to install Fibre Channel

HBA drivers that support these Fibre Channel HBAs, you may lose access to your boot device. If you

plan to install the PSP and have your boot device out in the SAN, it is recommended that you perform

the following steps:

1. Install the operating system.

2. Install the HP driver kit for your Fibre Channel HBA

3. Install the PSP.

This will ensure that the driver loaded by the operating system will discover Fibre Channel HBAs that

are capable of 8Gb transfer speeds.

VMWare

HP fully supports the use of Windows and Linux as a guest O/S on VMware ESX versions 2.5.x and

3.x. When running VMware, Fibre Channel HBAs are supported by embedded drivers supplied with

ESX. Windows and Linux FC HBA drivers are not used. To insure that your HBA is fully supported by

HP and VMware, please go to one of the websites below:

For VMware ESX version 3.x, see the website:

http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/vi_pages/vi_pubs_35.html.

For VMware ESX version 2.5.x, see the website:

http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/esx_pubs.html.

Important information

Presenting LUNs to a Linux host

When presenting XP LUNs to a Linux host,

• the LUNs must start with a LUN 0.

• the LUNs must be presented across all paths that are connected/configured from the XP storage

array.

• If LUN 0 is not present, SANsurfer will show the XP array as offline.

HP StorageWorks QLogic Fibre Channel host bus adapters for ProLiant and Integrity servers using

Linux and VMware operating systems release notes 13