Boot From SAN failover

[zsmithtek]

I know there is a way to do this but can't find a configuration doc.  If someone can help me out with this i'd appreciate it.

What i'm looking to do is the following.  Take a UCS chassis of 8 blades - configure 7 of them to boot from SAN via iSCSI.  Each blade runs Windows OS for whatever specific function.  Blade 8 in the chassis is a spare so if any of the 7 blades 'dies' Blade 8 will auto boot to the LUN of the dead blade.

Thanks for the help.

[zsmithtek]

So I found this forum post from a while ago.  I'm going to assume there is a more streamlined way to accomplish this.  Perhaps settings now that can be configured vs writing a custom script for Automatic service profile association of a failed blade to a spare blade.

https://communities.cisco.com/docs/DOC-35549

[Kirk J]

This kind of functionality really takes an orchestrator & monitoring type app to drive the decision making of 'is the server really dead', and many other rules that would be required to correctly implement that.

VMware, and other similar virtualization platforms typically have a HA feature that would just move work loads around if one of the node members goes down.

What Apps are you looking to run?  Can they be run on Windows Guest VM?

We see customers running MS SQL with 20+ vCPUs, and pushing 30,000-40,000 IOPs as a beefy guestVM.  Makes life a lot easier in terms of BCP,DR,  etc.

Thanks,

Kirk...

[zsmithtek]

I have random servers that are physical and I just have them running on blades.  Mostly SQL but some random others.  I've found where we can setup server pools and can get this to work if the blade is down.  I'm really not looking to get any kind of fancy and expect an outage, but just the automatic recovery is cool.  If a blade goes offline, I decommission, pull out of slot, a spare blade in the server pool will boot with this 'failed' blades SP and boom my server is back online.  Ultimately that's what I want.  I've seen older posts on this but nothing fairly recent.  Just curious as to the best way to make this happen with the latest release.