[CentOS] kickstart install on SAN with multipath

Wed Nov 19 18:19:41 UTC 2008
nate <centos at linuxpowered.net>

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