Using CentOS 5.1, though with a few hours work I could update to 5.2.. I can install to SAN with a single path no problem but I'd like to be able to use dm-multipath. From the kickstart docs it seems this is supported but there is no information as to what the various options mean
http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/5.1/Installation_Guide/s1-kickstart2-optio...
-- multipath (optional)
multipath --name= --device= --rule= --
I have a multipath.conf which works fine when I install to local disk, I'm not sure what I should put in the options above, perhaps something like
multipath --name=mpath0 --device=sda --device=sdb --rule= ???
Done tons of searches and can't find anything. Any idea what "rule" would map to in multipath.conf ? I've even installed the anaconda package and grepped through the code and can't find anything useful.
thanks
nate
On Fri, 2008-11-14 at 15:06 -0800, nate wrote:
Using CentOS 5.1, though with a few hours work I could update to 5.2.. I can install to SAN with a single path no problem but I'd like to be able to use dm-multipath. From the kickstart docs it seems this is supported but there is no information as to what the various options mean
http://www.centos.org/docs/5/html/5.1/Installation_Guide/s1-kickstart2-optio...
-- multipath (optional)
multipath --name= --device= --rule=--
Ah! I just ran through this exact scenario a week ago. Turns out in inspecting the anaconda code I couldn't actually find any support for that directive, it looks to be more of a placeholder, but I'm no python wizard.
What is does support though is auto detecting and creating a simple multipath.conf, good enough configure lvm with during the install.
This setup can be triggered by passing 'mpath' as a kernel parameter during kickstart.
Only other thing I had to do was add a bit of %post scripting to tweak multipath.conf and lvm.conf for our particular drive/controller setup.
Matthew Kent wrote:
Ah! I just ran through this exact scenario a week ago. Turns out in inspecting the anaconda code I couldn't actually find any support for that directive, it looks to be more of a placeholder, but I'm no python wizard.
What is does support though is auto detecting and creating a simple multipath.conf, good enough configure lvm with during the install.
I played with it for a couple hours and my experience was:
- It created the multipath configuration, though in %pre I had to run multipath to enable multipathing support - It could then see the device but would not install to it, after creating a partition in my experience multipathing has to be restarted, so the only way I think to get it to work is to come up with a way to manually partition in %pre and then tell kickstart to use the pre-existing partitions after restarting multipathing in %pre. Quite a bit more work than I expected given the few notes I have seen saying that it should "work". Given my timetable I decided to give up on this for now and use internal disks, I can re-visit it again later.
VMWare ESX 3.5 works flawlessly when booting from SAN by contrast!
This setup can be triggered by passing 'mpath' as a kernel parameter during kickstart.
Only other thing I had to do was add a bit of %post scripting to tweak multipath.conf and lvm.conf for our particular drive/controller setup.
thanks for the info!
nate
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Matthew Kent -
nate