ABOUT THIS BOOK

Linux on HP Integrity Servers covers the Linux operating system on HP Itanium^®-based systems, called the Integrity server family, running Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL).

This book starts out with extensive coverage of booting HP Integrity servers. These servers can run multiple operating systems so the boot process is important to understand. The boot process is substantially different than it is on HP Precision Architecture-based systems, called the HP 9000 family. The Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is an important part of booting HP Integrity servers, so I spend a significant amount of time on EFI in Chapter 1.

I then cover loading Linux on an HP Integrity server in Chapter 2. The installation is done in console-only mode since you may very well have an HP server without a graphics display on it. The graphics-based installation is nearly identical to that of loading an IA-32 system with Linux, so I didn't want to cover the same information that appears in many other Linux books. To load Linux on an HP Integrity server, you first load the HP Enablement Kit for Linux, which is a set of tools that provide a framework for installing, configuring, and recovering a Linux distribution on our Integrity servers. The kit is completely distribution agnostic, meaning that it is independent of a Linux distribution. For this book, we'll be loading Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL). However, much of the information applies to any Linux distribution that is supported on Integrity servers. The elilo program you'll use to bootstrap the Integrity server is provided as part of the HP Enablement Kit for Linux.

This book then covers many additional system administration topics in the subsequent chapters.

The versions of Linux that run on Integrity that are used in this book are types of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) family, including versions RHEL 3 and RHEL 2.1. The three members of the RHEL family are Advanced Server, Enterprise Server, and Workstation. The primary difference in these releases, at the time of this writing, has to do with their high- end capabilities. In the examples in this book I use RHEL Advanced Server because it supports greater than two CPUs, a lot of memory, and Itanium- based systems. There are also examples on IA-32 based systems that use other Red Hat releases. There are many Linux background chapters which apply to all Linux systems so the hardware platform, either Integrity servers or IA-32, is not important.

Although the term Itanium is used throughout this book, the current implementation of Itanium is Itanium 2. I just shortened the name to Itanium for easier reading. You may also see the old name of IA-64 appear occassionally in screen shots, but I won't use IA-64 in my text.

Other Linux distributions run on HP Integrity systems such as SUSE LINUX Enterprise Server. I used Red Hat because this release was available at the time I began writing the book and many of my customers were evaluating Integrity servers running Red Hat. In addition to Linux, HP-UX, Windows Server 2003, and OpenVMS run on HP Integrity servers. Some of the book's examples show the boot process in which Linux, Windows, and HP-UX are all loaded on the same HP Integrity server. Different operating systems run in different hard partitions, called Node Partitions (nPartitions or nPars for short) on HP Integrity servers. This capability is new at the time of this writing and will be enhanced dramatically by HP in the coming months and years.

This is the first edition of this book, but to keep up with the many advancements that will take place, you can expect several revisions in the future. I want to receive your feedback on this book and topics that you'd like to see covered in future revisions. Please send your thoughts to me at the following email address:

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