Boot from SAN, scratch partition

[T_16]

Everywhere I have looked, it says that esxi will not create a scratch partition on a boot from SAN volume.

Having just installed esxi 6.7U3 on a 3par lun, I see that in the scratch partition is listed as /vmfs/volumes/5eda8c99-dd914acc-f042-48df37424e58

which correlates to the remote lun.

So.... should I just leave it?

My question is, that once booted, does esxi switch to the running OS kernel and access this lun from its own vmware software initiator, or does it use the original HP iscsi initiator and basically share this nic between the two different initiators, and the writes to the boot lun are done by the underlying hardware/hpe network card, and then the writes to the normally configured luns are done by the vmware OS via its own software iscsi initiator?

I see now that in the 3par SSMC console, on a fresh install still only the hpe hardware level initiator is active and green, so this is used then throughout the time the host is live.

Would this have any detrimental impact on performance then, sharing out the lun via hardware and then the esxi software initiator? I guess this must be common, as 10gbe ports are not huge in number on many servers and setups!

Any advice really welcome.

[T_16]

OK I see what is happening now with the iSCSI initiator.

The HPE hardware initiator is used, up until about halfway through booting, then the vmware software isci initiator takes over.
I was confused as the vmware software initiator, takes the name off the hpe hardware initiator name set in the bios. Changing this to a vmware name after installation, shows that esxi switches to the software initiator of itself for all isci access beyond that point.

That makes it a lot easier to keep a single object for the host in the storage array, and just allow two initiators to handle it. Saves confusion over naming them the same thing.

EDIT:- what about ip's, I notice that esxi takes the same ip as that set in the BIOS for the initiators there. Are you for the bios based initiators to be on x.x.x.10, and x.x.x.11 then have esxi kick in and use its own ip's of x.x.x.12, and x.x.x.13, or should the bios/uefi based initiators be configured with the two ip addresses we would like in esxi iscsi initiator?