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ESX Boot from SAN and Storage Groups
So I'm interested to know what people are doing for Boot from SAN with VNX storage groups when using ESXi as I had a conversation with someone today and I'd never really looked into this much before.
Obviously with boot from SAN you need ensure that you present a LUN 0 to each host for the boot LUN. Obviously you can only have one LUN 0 per storage group so that basically means constructing a storage group for each ESXi host and adding a boot LUN with the Host LUN Unit (HLU) set to 0.
When you consider how to add the LUNs for the VMware datastores you could look at creating a storage group with all the datastore LUNs included and adding all the hosts. Unfortunately you can only have a host in a single Storage Group at any one time, so that won't work as the host is already in a storage group for the boot from SAN LUN.
So it appears that your only alternative is to use a storage group for each ESXi Host and add the boot from SAN LUN and the Datastore LUNs and manage it on a per host basis. This isn't a problem in a small environment but if you have a number of 32 host clusters??!! Adding a LUN quickly becomes a laborious task when you need to add it to 32 storage groups (scripting would speed this up but it still seems a bit cumbersome and potentially error prone)
I'm aware on UCS you can get quite clever through the creation of multiple virtual HBA's but unfortunately that's not an option in this particular instance.
Interested to know if anyone is doing something different for this or whether you've simply bitten the bullet and done it on a per host basis.
Craig Stewart
vSpecialist Technical UK/I
www.virtualpro.co.uk
bartelm
5 Posts
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January 27th, 2014 18:00
All vHBAs are registered under the same Hostname & IP address. The first image was the Storage Group for vh-clpoc-c1-04's Boot LUNs. This Storage Group is for the ESX cluster shared LUNs. The difference between the 2 Storage Groups are which vHBAs that are selected to belong to each specific Storage Group. It isn't necessary to de-register the vHBAs and re-register them under a different Hostname/IP address. Each server listed above have the same LUN Masking config. Each has their own Boot LUN SG & all of them belong to this Data/cluster SG. I think it's even possible to take the same HBA and divide it between 2 different SGs with path A0 belonging to SG 'A' and path B1 belonging to SG 'B'.
etaljic81
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January 27th, 2014 19:00
Interesting. This might be a loophole because EMC asks for two hosts to be created.
The only thing I would be concerned about is support. If you ever need to contact EMC Support they might raise a flag. If you can open a ticket with support and just ask for their blessing. That way you don't have to worry about it if you ever find yourself needing support down the road. Let us know what EMC support says if you do open a ticket.
bartelm
5 Posts
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January 27th, 2014 20:00
I'd have to review my research but I can say that VMWare recommends disabling autoregistration. I thought I saw a Primus article or some EMC document about it as well but that's just a vague memory.
dynamox
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January 27th, 2014 20:00
i don't know about VMware but it confuses the hack out of PowerPath. I created two storage groups: stg1 and stg2.
In stg1 i added LUN 200 and in stg2 i added LUN 300 and rebooted the box. As you can see below it thinks LUN 300 is in stg1 (wrong) and it also does not show the LUN number.