EMC QLogic manual Known Issues, Ntosknl Bsod

3

Configuring an EMC Boot Device

Known Issues

Be aware of these issues:

◆QLogic BIOS 1.26 and later for QLA23xx and BIOS 1.79 and later for QLA22xx HBAs allow for multiple Boot Port Name entries to be configured for high-availability booting after path failures.

Previous BIOS versions do not support this functionality, will boot only from a single storage array port, and cannot provide boot capability with path failures.

◆NTOSKNL BSOD (blue screen) during a link down event can cause filesystem corruption to mounted filesystems.

◆HBA boot BIOS does not support high availability while the OS is booting. It can handle path failures at boot initialization time, and after the OS has loaded. Path failures while the OS is loading will require the host to reboot before successfully completing the boot process. Refer to How a Server Responds to Failure in the Boot LUN Path on page 3-37 for additional information.

◆Degraded response time as the I/O load approaches storage system capacity can make the OS appear hung or result in a

NTOSKNL BSOD.

◆Boot files, Windows system files, and swap space should all be on the boot LUN. With certain server models, you can use an internal disk for the page file for stability; however, this might not increase fault tolerance and might reduce system recovery options.

◆Swap space must be available on %SYSTEMROOT% or core dump will fail.

◆For Windows 2003 on 64-bit IA64-2 servers, the system no longer uses an x86-compatible BIOS; therefore, enabling boot-from-array support with the HBA requires a separate firmware EFI download.

3-38 EMC Fibre Channel with QLogic HBAs in the Windows Environment