Apparatus and method for sharing boot volume among server blades
First Claim
1. A method for sharing a boot volume among server blades, comprising:
- partitioning said boot volume into at least two boot slices; and
correlating an individual boot slice of said at least two boot slices with an individual server blade of said server blades, wherein said boot volume is positioned on at least one of a backplane into which said server blades are inserted, a boot storage blade which is inserted into said backplane, or one of said server blades.
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Accused Products
Abstract
An apparatus and method for sharing a boot volume among server blades. The shared boot volume may be a single drive or a RAID volume. The shared boot volume is first partitioned into boot slices. Next, individual boot slices of the shared boot volume are correlated with individual server blades, which share the shared boot volume. When a boot slice is correlated with a server blade, the boot slice is presented to the server blade, and the server blade sees the boot slice and only the boot slice, and owns the boot slice. This correlation is transparent to the OS or applications on a given server blade, because the I/O controller masks all boot slices but the one owned by that server blade. As far as OS and applications are concerned, the server blade just has a single boot slice as a dedicated local drive.
67 Citations
24 Claims
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1. A method for sharing a boot volume among server blades, comprising:
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partitioning said boot volume into at least two boot slices; and
correlating an individual boot slice of said at least two boot slices with an individual server blade of said server blades, wherein said boot volume is positioned on at least one of a backplane into which said server blades are inserted, a boot storage blade which is inserted into said backplane, or one of said server blades. - View Dependent Claims (2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8)
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9. An apparatus for sharing a boot volume among server blades, comprising:
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means for partitioning said boot volume into at least two boot slices; and
means for correlating an individual boot slice of said at least two boot slices with an individual server blade of said server blades, wherein said boot volume is positioned on at least one of a backplane into which said server blades are inserted, a boot storage blade which is inserted into said backplane, or one of said server blades. - View Dependent Claims (10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16)
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17. An apparatus for sharing a boot volume among at least two server blades, comprising:
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a backplane into which said at least two server blades are inserted;
a boot volume partitioned into boot slices; and
an I/O controller which correlates an individual boot slice of said boot slices with an individual server blade of said at least two server blades, wherein said boot volume is positioned on at least one of said backplane, a boot storage which is inserted into said backplane, or one of said at least two server blades. - View Dependent Claims (18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24)
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Specification