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June 13th, 2018 08:00
R415, RH7, local drive changes when adding SAN storage
I have a PowerEdge R415 with latest BIOS with UEFI enabled.
I have an emulex adapter (LPe12002-M8) that is fibre connected to a Infortrend SAN device.
Firmware version for Emulex is US2.01A12.
When I zoned storage to the Emulex I could not longer boot. When I was in emergency mode, ran a dmesg | grep sd and found that my local storage became sdb. I zoned another lun to my HBA; as expected the boot still failed but this time my local storage became sdc. I've worked around the problem by changing my boot line in grub.cfg to /dev/sdc2. But I'd prefer to keep local storage on /dev/sda no matter what happens with my external storage. For example, I zone another lun and my local drive will become sdd so I'll have to fix my grub.cfg again.
I played with interrupts in BIOS so that my local drive controller has a higher IRQ or lower IRQ than the Emulex card but that didn't matter.
I previously worked on other Dell systems that supported the idea of pci scan order. On the R415 I didn't find an option even with the latest BIOS. I've contacted Dell support and they suggested I change the boot order in the BIOS. I tried to do that, but since I'm running UEFI, setting boot order is not an option. On the associated screen where one would hit enter to change boot order, it isn't selectable unless I change from UEFI to BIOS.
I'm open to suggestions on how to fix this so that my local drive always stays at /dev/sda regardless of what is zoned to the HBA. Thanks in advance for any insight you can offer.
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DELL-Josh Cr
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June 13th, 2018 09:00
Hi,
You could try tying the grub boot order to UUID. https://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/linux-hardware-18/boot-from-usb-drive-force-device-as-sda-879617/
bweddell
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June 13th, 2018 11:00
Josh - thanks for your reply. I did try this along the way. From what I can tell, the UUID points to the underlying drive letter. So, UUID=whatever points to /dev/sda. If /dev/sda has the OS files and becomes /dev/sdc then UUID=whatever can no longer find it.
I tested this by changing it to boot=UUID=whatever in grub.cfg and all was working. But as soon as I zoned storage, my /dev/sda became /dev/sdb (or /dev/sdc) and although I was pointing to the UUID, I could no longer boot.
I'll read over the link you sent again, but wanted to make you aware of what I've already done.
DELL-Josh Cr
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June 13th, 2018 11:00
If you press F11 during post and go to the uefi boot manager there is a uefi boot sequence that you can change. You can also remove options completely from being bootable.
bweddell
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June 20th, 2018 13:00
Just to clarify, my inability to boot was due to the fact I specified by boot parameter to /dev/sda2. When I changed it to /dev/sdc2 all operates normally.
In both cases, my local drive is being booted from but the operating system either loads or stops in the middle.
I'm looking for a resolution so that my internal drive is always /dev/sda. Perhaps changing scan order (if possible) would work. It has been mentioned I could use UUID but I'd prefer to use the /dev/sda naming so it is consistent across my server environment.