We're wondering if anyone has any experience with disaster recovery of the
zLinux guests when using FCP disk.  For a variety of reasons, we chose to
use the NPIV FCP disk instead of CKD for our Linux guests, including boot
LUNs.  The disk is synchronously remote copied between data centers.

As part of our disaster recovery planning, we started to think about being
able to boot off of the mirrored copy of the LUNs.  When we built our guest
to test DR with, we make both the primary LUNs and what will be the remote
copy LUNs active to the guest and define them within Linux.  We then made
the remote copy LUNs unavailable to the guest by synchronizing the primary
and remote copy LUNs.  We made updates, shutdown the guest, split the disk,
changed the switch zoning so that the primary disk was unavailable and only
the disaster recovery disk was detected.

It appears that the fstab entries, zipl.conf, bootmapper, and likely other
configuration items, use the subsystem serial number as part of the
identification for the partitions on the FCP disk in SLES10.

Since the serial number for the remote subsystem is different from the
primary, when we split the pair and try to boot from the remote disk, the
intial boot process starts but we eventually get 'Waiting for device
/dev/disk/by-id/scsi-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx-part4 to appear:' and
this references the boot LUN on the primary disk.  It exits to the shell at
that point.

If anyone else has already gone through this and knows all of the
configuration items we need to update to make this work, we would appreciate
the information so we don't have to reinvent the wheel.  If not, we'll keep
working through this and share what we figure out with the list if anyone is
interested.

Craig Collins
State of WI

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