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.
