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Chapter 6. Installing the operating system
The QS22 blade server supports Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.2 or later. 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.
If you download Linux distributions, ensure that you download the version
compatible with the IBM PowerXCell 8i processor.
For general information about 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 QS22
documentation on the IBM System Information Center at http://
publib.boulder.ibm.com/infocenter/systems/ or the BladeCenter support Web site at
http://www.ibm.com/support/us/en/.
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
The QS22 blade server does not come with any onboard hard disks or other
storage. Instead, you must allocate storage to the blade server as a resource. You
can allocate:
v Networked storage
v SAS attached storage
v Modular flash drive
Using a boot device on the network
You cannot directly install Linux on a network device attached to the blade server.
First you need to create an initial installation on a 64-bit POWER
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 56 illustrates the main steps for creating a network installation
that the blade server 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.
™
based system
55
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