A virtual maschine have a virtual NIC  which dont support Boot from SAN. Question of the day may if its possible to use a pRDM as a boot disk. I think this could work.

But the normal way is to present a LUN/VMFS Datastore to the ESXi and creating vDisks in the VMDK format which are holding all GuestOS data. These vDisks are compact, compatible, separated from others and its possible to transfer them and snapshooting.

Regards,

Joerg

Sure, we have about 700 vDisks and they all life on our EQLs :)

1. Create Volume on EQL and set an ACL so that ESXi can see the LUN

2. Create a VMFS5 Datastore on that LUN

3. Create VMs with vDisks

Thats the normal way. There is VSM(Virtual Storage Manager) which comes as a Plugin integrated into VMware vCenter which let you do the steps 1+2 also from the vSphere Client rather than EQL Group Manager. The VSM also supports HW Snapshots of Virtual Maschines.

Note: We only have a few VMs which use iSCSI into Guest  for accessing Volumes on the EQLs. 99% of all EQL Volume are presented to the VMware Hosts.

Regards,

Joerg

Thanks Joerg. So, can the VMDK format vDisks reside on the EqualLogic SAN?