Booting esx3 off QLA4050c

[zbenga]

Has anyone tried this? For some reason in my case it will not load the bios even thou in bios i can see the LUN and set it up accordingly

[infinitiguy]

I believe I had it working but chose to go back to local disks, just because local disks are much cheaper than my netapp disks and I couldn't see the point in complicating things by having a boot from san environment as well as all my VMFS traffic going all over the same HBA's

[zbenga]

well local disks is not an option, the server is a DL360G4 if that matters

[dconvery]

You need to enable boot booting on one screen and then point it to the proper WWID and LUN ID. I forget the screens exactly, but the first is in the general adapter settings..

[zbenga]

yup, did that and found both SP's (connecting to CX300i) setup to boot of LUN # and all but the bios still won't load and ESX install can't see any storage to install on

[zbenga]

ok, some development on this

i set the card up correctly, if found the lun on the san and configured it to boot lun#5

rebooted server and on reboot i got the message "no iSCSI device found" on the QLogic boot screen, I continued to boot off the cd and started installing ESX, esx loaded the QLA driver and found the lun, formated the lun installed ESX on the lun, ejected the CD at the end and can never boot that LUN.

Both HBA and DL360G4 have the latest bios/fw. The san is a CX300i and the switch between is a HP Procurve 1800-24G

Any ideas?

[dconvery]

It sounds like you have iSCSI turned on in the QLogic card. That should not cause it to not boot though. You may want to try to change the LUN ID to 1 or 2 on the CX, but LUN ID5 should work too.

You may have taken a non-default choice on the MBR setup too. That is the screen right after the disk partition screen.

[christianZ]

Well we are booting from san and our lun is 0 (not sure if important).

Can you see your configured boot lun in bios(ISCSI Boot Settings, Primary, Lun, Target, Iscsi Name/ Adapter boot mode: manual)?

[zbenga]

well got a new QLA and it works, i guess i had a faulty qla, would work fine but not boot, the replacement has same firmware/bootcode/etc.

the san presents lun 8 and boots ok, its not important to set it to 0, its important to boot of the same lun as the san presents to the hba