© Copyright IBM Corp. 2007. All rights reserved. 95
Chapter 6. Boot from InfiniBand using the
Cisco 3012 InfiniBand to FC
gateway
This chapter describes how to configure booting from external storage attached through a
high-speed InfiniBand fabric. Boot from InfiniBand (BoIB) allows diskless servers to mount
the boot device located on an external RAID-capable storage subsystem attached to Fibre
Channel SAN.
When a blade server with 4x InfiniBand HCA is initialized, it executes the BoIB firmware. The
firmware on the HCA then communicates with the switch server to determine which boot LUN
to request. Upon receiving the information from the switch server, the HCA performs the
functions of a standard SCSI initiator and reads the boot sector from remote Fibre Channel
attached storage. The remainder of the operating system loads as though the storage were
locally attached storage.
The topics that we discuss in this chapter are:
6.1, “Benefits of booting from high-speed InfiniBand” on page 96
6.2, “Blade booting from a SAN” on page 96
6.3, “Installing the OS on the Fibre Channel storage” on page 110
6
Comments to this Manuals