Patent ID: 7624262

Claim:
A computer program product comprising a computer readable medium having computer usable program code programmed for booting a Logical Partition using an external storage device, the operations of the computer program product comprising: creating a virtual Small Computer System Interface (“SCSI”) device assigned to a first logical partition (“LPAR”) of a first computer using a virtual input/output (“I/O”) server by mapping a logical unit number (“LUN”) of a storage volume to a SCSI ID uniquely associated with the virtual SCSI device, the virtual I/O server configured to map a physical I/O device of the first computer to one or more LPARs on the first computer, the storage volume located external to the first computer, and the first LPAR configured to share one or more physical processors and one or more physical I/O devices of the first computer with a plurality of LPARs; receiving a boot request to boot the first LPAR, the boot request identifying the storage volume as a boot device using the SCSI ID of the virtual SCSI device; retrieving boot data from the storage volume using a SCSI driver of the first LPAR; and booting the first LPAR using the boot data.