Solaris

I'm building a Solaris 11 OVM environment and want to configure everything to boot from our high performance SAN (no local disks). I've got everything working and the system boots nicely via an OBP configuration however I'd like to configure redundant IP interfaces within Solaris, what I'm struggling with is trying to create a redundant interface pair when one of my interfaces is configured as the boot interface, I've not found any documentation covering this despite this being an install option for Solaris 11.

Any ideas?

I'd think that would have to be handled in the NIC boot configurations, if it's even possible. Maybe if you configure multiple NICs to boot via iSCSI, the boot firmware will just try one after another?

I don't see how it can be an OS setting - the OS isn't running yet.

Note I said within Solaris, i.e. once the operating system has loaded. OBP can't aggregate interfaces.


I'd be surprised if Oracle had provided an install method that was a single point of failure....

beadm can control non-global zones zfs boot environments. I'm not sure what you want to do. If you have luns presented by different IP's maybe on different SAN connections, then I think you can backdoor it that way. I have never tried this, and fail to see what is gained by doing it.

Use beadm to create a BE snapshot, then clone zpool to another SAN on a separate IP. HA for booting should involve failover resetting the zfs zpool to use for boot. I do not know how to make this automatic.

....If I understand at all what you need.

Since Solaris supports iscsi multipath if you have two interfaces for ISCSI (say net0/net1), you can create two addresses (in same or different subnets), and present the iscsi lun for both those interfaces (initiators).

When you do that, the mpxio will notice that it is the same lun over two network paths and create one device with multipath active.

In case one interfaces (port on card) dies, it will transparently failover to the next.

For boot, you will have to define both paths in OBP as a boot device (one after another).
If boot works from both devices using boot command you have a go (and it should since it should see two targets before booting into OS).

Basically you will not be using ipmp but mpxio for iscsi failover.

I'm unable to find a specific 'howto' for this, but combining several documents looks like it can be done.