Virtual Lifestyle

Booting a Lefthand SAN/iQ node requires a serial port

Aug 25, 2010 Blogs

When you’re booting a Lefthand Virtual SAN Appliance (this also applies to the Failover Manager), make sure you don’t disable ‘Serial port A’. It is required for console output, which is set to ‘ttyS0′ in the syslinux.cfg file of the underlying Linux OS:

So, make sure that the BIOS is set like this:

and not like this:

If you want more information about the boot process, use the ‘ESC’ key to abort the bootloader and type ‘vga’ in the ‘boot:’ prompt. This wil disable output to the serial port and enable output to the screen: