Boot from SAN (ESXi)

you are on a mission ..aren't you ?

Oh and please don't call a Storage Array a SAN. A SAN is a network, so the SAN switches are the SAN.

OK, sorry about that. I do understand what a SAN is but have got lazy recently and referred to the array as a SAN. Will not happen again

Going off Dynamox's info,  one thing you will need to do is since you are going to have multiple storage groups that need to see the same datastore lun's, you need to make sure that the host ID is the same across all of them.

I would suggest adding the boot luns to each storage group  and making them hostID 0.  Then add the datastore lun's to one storage group and get the host ID # for each.  Then when you add those same lun's to the other storage groups with the other ESX servers, you will have to manually  assign the host ID to each.  (or you can add one at a time in hostID order)  Once you get that done, you can scan the bus within ESX

not a bad idea ..take a look at this integration paper

White Paper: EMC CLARiiON Integration with VMware ESX—Applied Technology

Creating another post is up to you.  I would say that if you ask a question in a post and mark it as answered, if you post another question in that same thread, it might not get the attention it needs since most will think it has been answered to your liking.

Dont worry about asking  questions.  This is what this place it for.  There are many folks here that will respond when they can. And alot of us have a wide range of skill sets (except Dynamox who seems to have them all)   thatyou will get an answer sooner or later.  If it is urgent then call support or open a live chat.

That live shat is pretty usefull for asking general questions.  I have used it alot!!

That is what I thought. Thank you.

Thank you for this. When creating the boot LUNS is it best to create them on different RAID Groups (separate disks). For instance if I created the boot LUNS on one RAID 5 group and two disks were to fail in that group could I potentially lose all my ESX servers?

Sorry if I should have create a new post for this. Apologies if I am asking silly questions but I am pretty new to Storage Arrays and VMware.

Thank you dynamox and kenn2347 for such quick replies.

dynamox, I think I have read through that document before as I remember reading that ESXi and boot from SAN was not supported. I know ESXi is now supported. Looking at the document it does state to use LUN masking to ensure that hosts only have access to "their" LUNs as we have discussed previously. It does not mention anything about ensuring that you do not have all your boot LUNs in the same RAID Group (using the same disks). Do you think it makes sense to separate my ESXi boot LUNs over two or three RAID groups instead of having all five of them in the same one?

If I have anymore questions I will post a new thread. Thank you to everyone that has taken the time to give me help and advice. It is greatly appreciated.

dynamox, I think I have read through that document before as I remember reading that ESXi and boot from SAN was not supported. I know ESXi is now supported. Looking at the document it does state to use LUN masking to ensure that hosts only have access to "their" LUNs as we have discussed previously. It does not mention anything about ensuring that you do not have all your boot LUNs in the same RAID Group (using the same disks). Do you think it makes sense to separate my ESXi boot LUNs over two or three RAID groups instead of having all five of them in the same one?

from availability perspective, sure you can put them in separate raid groups and make sure LUNs are "balanced" between SPs.. but from performance perspective it does not matter on ESX ..once the kernel is booted all the workload is on VMFS datastores.