Proxmox 6.0.1 Install on Cisco UCS Blades

[jmorton]

Has anyone installed Proxmox 6.0.1 on Cisco UCS Blades with boot-from-SAN LUNS? If so, could you share how you did this?

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

I'm not familiar with the UCS Blades, but maybe a few pointers I ran into recently:
* some users run into problems due to firmware-settings [0]
* A colleague recently told me that you can configure the SAN-LUNS to show up as local disks inside the blades - then you should probably be able to install PVE on those from the installer
* You can install PVE on top of a regular Debian Installation (maybe there are more pointers of how to get Debian installed on UCS) [1]

Else - could you maybe describe where you ran into issues and what you tried (error-logs, screenshots ) - maybe that would help to narrow down potential issues.

Hope this helps!

[0] https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/i...create-bios_boot-partition.57408/#post-264474
[1] https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/pve-admin-guide.html#_install_proxmox_ve_on_debian

 

[jmorton]

Well, I got Proxmox to boot from SAN; however, our UCS is attached to an HDS storage array with 4 LUN paths to the UCS fabric where the blades live. Upon boot, Proxmox appears to get confused about multiple paths to the boot disk. See attachment for details. Any input would be appreciated. I suppose I could go down to a single path just to prove that UCS boot will work, but Proxmox clearly isn't designed for SAN deployments like Vmware. I have a ton of UCS blades and SAN storage to work with so I'd love for this config to work.

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

I suppose I could go down to a single path just to prove that UCS boot will work

Sounds like a good idea - at least you remove one layer that might cause problems (multipath - especially for booting) - for your analysis

If you want to boot from a multipath device you need to install multipath-tools-boot [0], and check out its documentation.

Apart from that - multipath can be a bit tricky to get configured initially - maybe you'll find some helpful links for the combination of storage and blades and debian online

I hope this helps!

[0] https://packages.debian.org/buster/multipath-tools-boot

 

[jmorton]

Stoiko, after much trouble, I have a single proxmox node running off SAN boot. I have also installed the multi-path driver, but Proxmox didn't like it much when I added multiple LUN paths back in and rebooted the blade. I guess there will be some manual configuration required for each LUN which is presented through our storage fabric to UCS. I'll let you know if I can figure that out and post results here. We also ran into issues with VLAN tagging on the /etc/network/interfaces configuration. See below. We added two interfaces into the vmbr0 interface and configured bridge ports with VLAN tag 1000.

auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
address 10.1.100.110
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 10.1.100.1
bridge_ports enp6s0.1000, enp7s0.1000
bridge_stp off
bridge_fd 0

 

[Stoiko Ivanov]

We also ran into issues with VLAN tagging on the /etc/network/interfaces configuration.

Which issues ? and did you mange to resolve them? - the config looks about right - see also https://pve.proxmox.com/pve-docs/chapter-sysadmin.html#_vlan_802_1q

I have also installed the multi-path driver, but Proxmox didn't like it much when I added multiple LUN paths back in and rebooted the blade.

You installed both `multipath-tools` and `multipath-tools-boot` I assume?

You need to create a /etc/multipath.conf fitting for your setup - Your storage and blade-center provider probably have documentation on that issue.

With PVE 6 (actually Debian Buster on which PVE 6 is based) there were a few changes with the multipath config - so it might need some adaptation
@LnxBil explained that quite well in another thread: https://forum.proxmox.com/threads/m...ce-is-not-created-proxmox-6.57272/post-264048

I'll let you know if I can figure that out and post results here.

Thanks! reports of working configurations are very valuable to our community (it will help another user in a similar situation)!

 

[jmorton]

VLAN tagging issue was simply that we didn't have the interfaces tagged.

multipath-tools and multipath-tools-boot are both installed. I don't have the /etc/multipath.conf file configured yet, but will work on that today and post results. I appreciate your help and I'm happy to add to the community knowledgebase.