SAN boot requirement

[winthuya]

Hello Community members!!!

This is my first discussion (question) here.

Really appreciate for any help.

I am planning to install around 10 ESXi hosts using SAN Boot (EMC storage).

Honestly, I never deployed SAN boot before.

Is there any best practices for SAN boot? Should I request only one LUN for all ESXi host OS? or should I request 10 LUNs for 10 ESXi hosts?

What will be the recommended LUN size for ESXi host OS (one or 10 OS)

Should I request a separate LUN for ESXi OS ?

Thanks

Thu Ya

[vThinkBeyondVM]

Hi Friend,

  You need to first consider boot from SAN requirements:

Plz refer:

1.VMware vSphere 4 ESXi Installable and vCenter Server Documentation Center

2. VMware vSphere 4 - ESX and vCenter Server

3.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUkCQPkn1Tk

The boot LUN must be dedicated to a single server. Hence you require dedicated LUN for each ESXi. (Total 10)

Let me know if you have any other doubts.

[bayupw · Accepted solution]

Hi Thu Ya,

Do you use FC or iSCSI?

You can read the vSphere Documentation about booting ESXi from FC SAN, iSCSI, or FCoE:

vSphere 5.5 Documentation Center - Booting ESXi from Fibre Channel SAN

vSphere 5.5 Documentation Center - Booting ESXi with Software FCoE

vSphere 5.5 Documentation Center - Using ESXi with iSCSI SAN

Make sure your HBAs/iSCSI NICs and arrays/storage support booting from SAN/iSCSI

Yes you will need to request a separate LUN for your 10 ESXi hosts means 10 LUN (some vendor requires LUN ID 0).

Be sure to exclusively mask the boot LUN to the host, boot-from-SAN boot LUNs must be exclusively masked to their host.

The host can get the wrong identity from an incorrect LUN so you should configure single-initiator zoning in boot from SAN.

The Emulex and QLogic BIOS can become unresponsive if several other initiators are in the same zone and you try to select a boot LUN.

For the LUN requirements, you can prepare ~6GB LUN for each LUN as described in the vSphere 5.5 Documentation Center - ESXi Hardware Requirements

Storage Requirements for ESXi 5.5 Installation

Installing ESXi 5.5 requires a boot device that is a minimum of 1GB in size.

When booting from a local disk or SAN/iSCSI LUN, a 5.2GB disk is required to allow for the creation of the VMFS volume and a 4GB scratch partition on the boot device.

Some related KB as below:

VMware KB: Preliminary Configuration for Boot-from-SAN

VMware KB: Recommended disk or LUN sizes for VMware ESX 3.x / 4.x and ESXi 3.x / 4.x / 5.x installat...

VMware KB: Identifying ESXi/ESX boot LUNs for Boot From SAN configurations

How to configure ESXi to boot via Software iSCSI? | VMware vSphere Blog - VMware Blogs

Message was edited by: Bayu Wibowo

[winthuya]

Hi Bayu,

Really appreciate for your help.

You are great!!

Thanks

Thu Ya