Creating a Linux network installation for BladeCenter QS21

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.1 or Fedora 7 does not directly support an installation to an NFS-mounted disk. You must create an initial installation on disk. From this initial installation on disk you can create a network installation that can be used by the BladeCenter QS21.

The BladeCenter QS21 does not provide on-board disk space. If SAS-attached storage is available to your BladeCenter QS21, you can install on a SAS disk. Alternatively, you can use any a 64-bit POWER-based system that is supported by RHEL 5.1 or Fedora 7 and has enough disk space for the installation.

Figure 1 illustrates the main steps for creating a network installation for BladeCenter QS21.

Figure 1. Overview of the network installation procedure

This graphic is explained in the text that follows.

First you install Linux^® on the local disk space of a 64-bit POWER-based system. You then copy the resulting root file system to a Network File System (NFS) server where you make it network-bootable and adapt it to the specifics of an individual blade server.

See http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/StatelessLinuxCreateClientImage for general information about installing Linux on diskless systems.

This section describes how you can create a network installation for a single blade server. You can create multiple copies of this first installation and adapt each copy for use by a different blade server. See http://www.ibm.com/alphaworks/tech/dim/ for a description of a tooled approach of managing root file systems and boot kernels for numerous blade servers.

Requirements
This topic describes the resources you require for setting up a net-boot environment for BladeCenter QS21.
How the network boot process works
The network boot process works as follows:
Creating a network installation for the BladeCenter QS21
Perform these main steps to set up your network installation.

Parent topic: BladeCenter QS21 Specifics