“This mini how-to shows you how to dual boot between AIX and Linux operating systems in a clustering environment, where available hardware resources are limited. The information presented in this document is based on actual experience. It should be used only by those who have some knowledge of system administration and skills in working with the IBM System p5 architecture.”
“in a clustering environment, where available hardware resources are limited” this just doesn’t make a lot of sense to me, lol
Yeah I have to agree, 36 nodes is “limited”!?
I guess if you can afford a cluster of Power5 chips, 38 nodes might be limiting.
So this article doesn’t apply to 90% of OSNews readers
its quite odd. if you have LPAR, you dont relly ‘dual boot’ at all.. thats the whole point of LPAR!
its quite odd. if you have LPAR, you dont relly ‘dual boot’ at all.. thats the whole point of LPAR!
If you look at the article you’ll see they discuss installing each OS in an LPAR, but only powering on one at a time. In effect dual booting by halting one OS, then powering on the other from the relevant management server. The use of LPARs is incidental here to provide an easy way to dual boot.
I guess the limited resources they are talking about here isn’t the number of nodes, but rather the type of node. Eg. a p5 510, which is LPAR capable but on which it would be illadvised to run several partitions at once due to the limited hardware.
The major flaw in this system btw is that you lose the capability to mirror your boot disk, as the other OS is installed on it (we’re talking standard 2 disk system). Any sysadmin will tell you this is just an accident waiting to happen. It could work though if the system is non-critical enough (like 1 of n webservers in some sort of load balancing scheme), but why put yourself through the hassle of restoring from backup if a disk fails ? I guess it is meant for testing purposes only.
It has been some time since I used a pSeries box, you could do a mksysb of the AIX LPAR if the machine was “mission critical”, but I’m not sure whether you could do that with Linux. But yeah, no mirrors is bad.
In the ASC (ASCI) Purple documentation , I think the nodes are
required to dual-boot. Because:
1) upgrading between patches and OS levels.
2) system maintainance.