[VHRISO] adding fibre channel multipath device

[massimiliano.rizzi]

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Hello experts and good day,

apologies in advance if this has already been asked. Practical advice needed here.

We are in a situation where one of our customers, who has just switched to Veeam, is currently using a helper spare physical server from our lab environment to begin with and would like to migrate to a more robust solution. The goal for next year is to purchase one Object First Ootbi appliance as soon as budget will be approved, but for now and the next few months we will need to use some existing hardware, more specifically an IBM System X3650 M5 physical server (with plenty of CPU and RAM) directly attached via Fibre Channel to an IBM Storwize V5000 box (with plenty of disk space). All hardware is in optimal condition.

I’m conscious that we are hitting a (current) limitation of the Managed Hardened Repository ISO solution as currently Fibre Channel LUNs provisioned to the server are not supported, but at the same time I would do anything to avoid the Windows route due to the lack of immutability, even though it will be easier for us to configure especially when it comes to multipathing.

Can someone please elaborate more on the reason why Fibre Channel LUNs provisioned to a physical server are not currently supported ? Based on my understanding, this limitation seems to be specifically related to out-of-the-boxmultipathing support, which inevitably adds complexity to the guided setup experience that has been introduced in the Managed Hardened Repository ISO. Is there any reason not to go the Managed Hardened Repository ISO, even though some manual work will be required ?

Any help and practical advice on this will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance !

Massimiliano

[HannesK]

Hello,
we limited the support to internal disks only because supporting an operating system directly on hardware is a new topic for our support organization. Once we see how the support load develops with internal disks, we can decide on whether we might support fibre channel / multipathing devices in future.

If you disconnect fibre channel during installation and you do everything afterwards, then it will probably work. In the end, it's still plain Rocky Linux.

Best regards
Hannes

[massimiliano.rizzi]

Hi Hannes,

first of all, thank you for your reply.

Today I took some time in order to familiarize myself with new Managed Hardened Repository ISO in our lab environment and do the multipathing configuration after the initial installation with fibre channel disconnected.

I used a couple of spare IBM System x Servers and I performed the initial installation using the IBM IMM remote console java app. The very first thing I noticed after completing the installation and clicking the Reboot System button is the Remote control keyboard not working. Both keyboard and mouse worked fine during the installation. Did you have any reports of this issue from other users ?

Apart from that, which approach would you recommend in order to temporarily get root and do the multipathing configuration ? Until today, I run the procedure below (provided by Chris.Childerhose) using the old Hardened Repository ISO from last year:



Will it work using the vhradmin account ?

Thanks!

Massimiliano

[HannesK]

Hello,
I have not heard about that type of keyboard issue. The only thing I heard is if you install via remote console, that you cannot plug in USB keyboards because that's blocked by a security feature. If you like to get it investigated, please open a support case and post the case number here for reference.

I did not test the procedure, but I'm relatively sure, that the "touch /.autorelabel" step is missing to relabel for SE-Linux. Additionally SSH will not work for vhradmin because that user is blocked. You can either remove him from the block list or use veeamsvc and give veeamsvc sudo permissions.

Best regards
Hannes

[chris.childerhose]

Yes keep in mind the steps I listed were over a year ago so different ISO altogether and the way things are done now. Just context around what I did.