Installation Guide For Sparc - Solaris SXCE

Basically the install process is very similar to the process of installing Solaris x86 onto iSCSI disk. The biggest difference is the way to configure different firmware, as before booting to Solaris, x86 platform will be relying on iBFT-capable firmware (BIOS) to communicate with the iSCSI target, while Sparc platform will be relying on OBP to do the almost same thing.

Before proceeding, please make sure the system is running OBP version >= 4.31 and the command ’show-iscsi’ is available.

Prerequisites

Collecting following items before starting the installation, some of them will be used during

the installation process, and may also be a part of the boot argument to ‘boot’ command in OBP.

* iSCSI Target IP/Port

* Router/Gateway IP if the iSCSI Target is on a different subnet

* Which ethernet interface to be used to access the iSCSI target

* Lun number which will be used as the root disk

Installation Process

The installation process is very similar to the x86 case as described in an earlier post, for

both the cd/network installation and desktop/console session. However a few items are needed to be collected for later use to boot the OS.

* Target Name

* Root Slice if it is not ‘a’ as default

Also, specifying chap via ‘iscsiadm’ if authentication is setup in target side. For detailed steps please refer to the Chap. 14 of System Administration Guide: Devices and File Systems.

Postinstall Configuration

A special boot device argument needs to be composed to perform iSCSI boot in OBP, which is in the format of,

‘net:key=value[,...]‘

The following keys are used to support iSCSI boot,

iscsi-target-ip       <Required>     iSCSI Target IP address
iscsi-target-name     <Required>    iSCSI Target Name
host-ip               <Required>    Host IP address
router-ip             <Optional>    The gateway IP address. It may not be necessary if the host and the iSCSI target are within the same subnet.
iscsi-lun             <Optional>    The lun unit number required by iscsi boot. It is a hexadecimal dash-separated format, defaults to 0. A example of the fully specified number would be 2-0-0-0, however usually it is specified as ‘2′.
iscsi-port           <Optional>    iSCSI target IP port. It is a decimal formatted integer from 1 to 65535, defaults to 3260.
iscsi-partition        <Optional>    The bootable partition on the iscsi target, defaults to "a".

If you have used the CHAP as the authentication method, you can set the CHAP user name and password as follows in OK mode:

{0} ok set-ascii-security-key chap-user <your chap name>
{0} ok set-ascii-security-key chap-password <your chap secret>

 Note, bidirectional authentication is not available here.

An example of the full argument would be,

net:iscsi-target-name=iqn.1986-03.com.sun:2510.600a0b800049c94d00000000493c920b,host-ip=10.13.49.129,iscsi-lun=3-0-0-0,iscsi-target-ip=10.13.49.145,router-ip=10.13.49.1

An dev alias is probably preferred for such an argument, and then passed to the ‘boot’ command in OBP.

Source/Kaynak : http://blogs.sun.com/cancel/entry/guidance_for_installing_solaris_nevada