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iSCSI booting RHEL6.1 on B200 UCS M81KR

kngo
Level 1
Level 1

I am trying to iSCSI boot RHEL6.1 using our B200 and M81KR Palo nic.

Installation of RHEL6.1 is successful, but I encounter a "Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!" error message when I attempt to boot the OS.

Network configuration:

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-Service profile has four vNICs configured. Two of these vNICs (named 'eth0' and 'eth1') are used for management and on vlan100. The other two vNICs (named 'eth2' and 'eth3') are used for data purposes and are both on vlan7.

-I have one iSCSI vNIC configured with the default iSCSI Adapter Policy applied. iSCSI vNIC is overlayed on 'eth2'.

-native vlan enabled on each interface and vlan.

network.jpg

network2.jpg

Storage configuration:

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Storage configuration is a Nimble Storage CS240.

Data ports of the array are directly connected to the FI and FI ports are configured as Appliance ports.

As a guide, I followed the instructions found here: https://supportforums.cisco.com/docs/DOC-18756

The section for M81KR and RHEL6 was pretty short and I do not feel that I overlooked something (howerver still possible).

I was successfully able to iSCSI boot ESX4.1u1, ESX5.0u1, and Windows2k8R2 so resonable to assume that the networking is configured properly.

And installation of RHEL6.1 completes. -It's just boot that fails.

Any ideas on what I might be missing or unique with RHEL6.1?

Here is a screenshot of the Kernel panic from RHEL6.1 when it boots.

Kernel panic.jpg

4 Replies 4

kngo
Level 1
Level 1

Can someone please explain to me why RHEL is able to iSCSI boot if I have a local disk installed? In my original post, I did installation with the local SAS drives physically removed from the blade. In this setup, booting without SAS drives caused the Kernel Panic after ~80% of the OS had loaded. The only device in this setup, and during installation, is the iSCSI device itself.

Howerver, if I choose the same installation options, but I have SAS drives phyically attached to the blade, then RHEL is able to iSCSI boot??? Your likely thinking in this setup I made a mistake and that I am booting from the local drive. It's posible my loader configuration is wrong, but when I do a 'du -h' is it shows that my root partition is on my 50GB iSCSI disk.

And the question would still remain as to why the Kernel Panic occured if there were no physical disks installed?

For my (in)sanity check, can someone please remove all non-iSCSI disks from their B200, try to install RHEL6.1to an iSCSI device, and then iSCSI boot it? Possible RHEL bug here?

And perhaps it is user error. Below are the installation screenshots of the major installation steps. Can someone please point out what I'm doing wrong  that would somehow involve the local SAS disk?

padramas
Cisco Employee
Cisco Employee

Ken,

Thanks for the detailed information.

I would suggest you to open a TAC service request if we can consistently reproduce this behavior ( i.e boot failure when we do not have local HDDs )

Padma

Thanks, Padma. I will file one shortly.

Just an additional point of reference..

I may be encountering https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=794751 which won't get fixed til RHEL6.4

I have RHES 5.5 booting form iSCSI without issue. Kind of sad if 6.4 has an issue.

My UCS Blog http://realworlducs.com
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