differentiate Boot LUN from data LUNs

[kaashifVTech]

hi,

I am currently designing a project:

1. Cisco UCS blades

2. EMC VNX 5300

3. ESXi 5.0

There are 9 blades and 2 x VNX boxes . i have created 4 x vHBA (2 for boot LUNs + 2 for other LUNs). First 2 vHBA are zoned properly with both FC Switches which further connected with both VNX boxes. i have created 4 x Boot LUNs on 1 VNX and 5 on other only for boot. more than 100 LUNs are data LUNs.

Confusion 1: How each ESX host will defferentiate that this is my boot LUN, when all LUNs and ESXi hosts will reside in single storage group? is Host LUN ID 0 will work on all 9 boot LUNs?

Confusion 2: do I need to keep replica of each boot LUN across the SAN boxes, so that in case 1 SAN box goes down, blade can acccess LUN from 2nd SAN?

Confusion 3: I was reading a blog, it was saying " We can create a storage group for each vSphere host and house the boot  LUN there, containing that host’s vHBA0/vHBA1, and then a “cluster  storage group” and containing the entire cluster of the hosts’  vHBA1/vHBA2 initiators." What is cluster storage group he is refering to. i dont have any idea of this term or I am interperating it wrong. Simply could getting this point?

It would be a great favor for me, as I am only stuck on these points, otherwise everything is on it quite place.

Thanks in advance!

Kaashif

[ThomDaleyPPI]

I know this is an old post but I have this solved.  You have to create separate storage groups for each host and then individually add the boot LUN to each to reserve LUN ID 0 (it has to boot from here.)  Once you have all of those configured you then go and add the datastore LUNs to all of the ESXi storage groups one at a time until all of them are added to all group.  This guarantees all of the datastores will have the same LUN ID across the cluster.