Boot from SAN ESXi

[anupampushkar]

Hi All,

Can anyone help me to understand boot from SAN for ESXi. How to do configure, Drawbacks and best practice.

thanks

Anupam Pushkar

[admin]

Hi Anupam,

Guess this doc has everything you need, let me know if you require more information or specific info.

VMware vSphere 5.1

Thanks,
Avinash

[john23]

I will try to explain in brief:

Boot from SAN : ESXi (hypervisor)  will be installed on remote LUN ( FC,iSCSI,FCOE). In local server you do not need any harddisk, since OS will be installed in remote LUN. All relevant partition will be created in it.

Configuration: It depends Boot from SAN will be configured with which Protocol. It varies on initiator side configuration. From the target side just LUN need to mapped where we need to install OS. If you specify which protocol you are trying, and hardware initiator if you are using, provide details about it.

Benefit with boot from SAN:

- Server doesn't require any local disk

- Storage replication feature can be used for data protection (configuration save)

- If one server goes for maintenance , Lun can be mapped to another server, and do the boot configuration related change and boot the server

Cons:

- Configuration is tricky, you need to know configuration related info

-Troubleshooting require expertise, since we are dealing with storage infrastructure as well.

-A