Diskless blades can not boot from iSCSI SAN with RHEL 7.0

Solution Verified - Updated -

Environment

  • Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7.0
  • kernel-3.10.0-123.el7

Issue

Here we found a blocking issue in RHEL7 kernel, which prevents us to boot our diskless HP blade from SAN via HBA’s HW iSCSI initiator.

The problem is in dracut, it does not load iscsi_firmware unless there’s at least one NIC up with IP from DHCP, in our targeting production setup, there’s of course no DHCP server in any network, thus no blade can be booted.

Fix should be made to Darcut to load iscsi_firmware anyway no matter there’s up network or not.

Resolution

This issues has been worked on in private Bug 1094469 - "RHEL 7 RC2 fail to boot with iscsi offload on BL460Gen8 with Emulex 554FLB LOM", which has been fixed with the RHEL 7.1 errata RHBA-2015-0375

Booting without "ip=ibft" and without a long DHCP should be possible with this fix going into RHEL-7.1

http://git.kernel.org/cgit/boot/dracut/dracut.git/commit/?id=98b104e88799ad461d9322faaee4c831d35c96c4

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