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Chapter 6. Installing the operating system
BladeCenter QS21 supports the following operating systems:
v Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.1
v Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2
If you download Linux distributions, ensure that you download the version
compatible with Cell/B.E.
Fedora (Fedora 7 and later) can be installed and supported from the Open Source
only. You can view the current support levels in the Information Center topic
Specified operating environments for Cell Broadband Engine solution.
For general information on installing Linux, see the installation instructions that
come with the distribution or are available at http://www.redhat.com/.
For additional instructions specific to your blade server, check for QS21
documentation on the BladeCenter support Web site at http://www.ibm.com/
systems/bladecenter/support/.
If you need to install Linux on numerous blade servers, consider using DIM
(Distributed Image Management for Linux Clusters). DIM is a sophisticated cluster
management system especially for large and very large number of nodes. For more
information on DIM see http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/dim/.
Note: IBM may add support for later versions of the operating systems or other
Preparing a boot device
BladeCenter QS21 does not come with any onboard hard disks or other storage.
Instead, you must allocate storage to BladeCenter QS21 as a resource. You can
allocate:
v Networked storage
v SAS attached storage
Note: A remote SAS storage must boot before BladeCenter QS21 attempts to boot
Using a boot device on the network
You cannot directly install Linux on a network device attached to BladeCenter
QS21. First you need to create an initial installation on a 64-bit POWER
system with local storage. You can then create multiple copies of the root file
system on an NFS server. To be able to boot a particular blade server from a copy,
adapt the instance specifics to the blade server and export the adapted copy for
NFS mounting.
Figure 27 on page 54 illustrates the main steps for creating a network installation
that BladeCenter QS21 can boot from.
© Copyright IBM Corp. 2006, 2008
operating systems. You can check the IBM support Web site or the
Information Center topic Specified operating environments for Cell
Broadband Engine solution to see the currently supported operating systems
and levels.
the operating system from it.
™
based
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