HP Dynamic Root Disk (DRD) manual Rehosting and unrehosting systems, Rehosting overview

7 Rehosting and unrehosting systems

A new feature of Dynamic Root Disk (DRD) version B.1131.A.3.2 is rehosting. Rehosting enables you to boot a DRD clone on a system other than the one where it was created. This new functionality is supported on LVM-managed root volumes running on Itanium® systems with HP-UX 11i v3. This capability enables a number of new uses for DRD clones. There are three main uses of rehosting:

•Provisioning of new systems, particularly Itanium BladeSystems (blades) and Integrity Virtual Machines

•Testing of new software before deploying it in a production environment

•Installing software on a clone by an alternative method, other than drd runcmd

IMPORTANT: For additional information on rehosting, including required software, see the Exploring DRD Rehosting in HP-UX 11i v2 and 11i v3 white paper, located at http://www.hp.com/ go/drd-docs.

The initial release of drd rehost has been tested on Integrity Virtual Machines and on blades with Virtual Connect. In addition, preliminary testing indicates that simple (single root volume group) standalone LVM-managed Itanium-based systems running a September 2008 HP-UX 11i

v3 Operating Environment (OE) can be rehosted to another system with the exact same hardware. The benefit of the September 2008 HP-UX 11i v3 Operating Environment is the availability of “Self healing of boot disk configuration”, which is provided by LVM and described in the September 2008 HP-UX 11i v3 Release Notes, located in the HP-UX 11i v3 - 2008 Release Documents Portfolio.

7.1 Rehosting overview

For details of the drd rehost command, including available options and extended options, see The drd rehost command.

The common steps for rehosting are:

1.Create a system image using the drd clone command

2.Create a system information file for the new image, which contains information such as hostname, IP addresses, language, time zone, and other system information

3.Copy the system information file to the EFI partition using the drd rehost command

4.Unpresent the disk (new image) from the source system and present it to the target system that will boot the rehosted image.

5.Process the new system information file with the auto_parms(1M) utility during the boot of the rehosted image

In order to perform these steps, minimal revisions of Dynamic Root Disk and auto_parms(1M), delivered in the SystemAdmin.FIRST-BOOTfileset are required. For details, see the Exploring DRD Rehosting in HP-UX 11i v2 and 11i v3 white paper, located at http://www.hp.com/go/ drd-docs.

7.2 Rehosting examples

In the following examples you can substitute a hot-swappable disk for the SAN LUN. Refer to your Storage Area Network software documentation for information on presenting and unpresenting a LUN to a system.

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