Comments on: Don’t SAN Boot VMWare ESX?

By: Aaron Delp

Aaron Delp — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:51:10 +0000

Daniel - Thank you for your post. Sorry for the delay in posting the comment, I have been on vacation.

Here is what I have been told by other engineers in my company with more FC SAN boot experience than myself.

FC Boot is robust in the fact that the connections are redundant and if a path fails, the other will kick in and ESX will not crash (purple screen of death). But, it is not an active-active connection as you state.

iSCSI Boot does not handle losing a path and the machine will PSOD on you even if you have redundant connections. The drivers just do not handle it well.

By: Daniel Hernandez

Daniel Hernandez — Wed, 10 Sep 2008 03:07:30 +0000

I’ve heard more than once that ESX fabric driver doesnt compare to other drivers out there such as Linux Qlogic Multipathing. Thats its not a true multipath driver that it cant load balance thats its very touchy. I’ve seen some of it first hand but at times Id almost question the SAN setup when I’ve seen it. I saw your post on not using Fibre for ESX booting and Id like to know if you had any comments on the ESX driver and was to curious to your thoughts and of your readers.

By: Aaron Delp

Aaron Delp — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:59:35 +0000

I would love to hear more about it! I will be in contact. Thank you very much!

By: Cornel

Cornel — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 18:37:15 +0000

We have been booting VMware from SAN and do not want to do it differently. One important thing is to boot from NFS and use an N Series as your Storage Server. You therefore can use 1 GB or 10 GB adapters in your servers and also save on licensing because the FibreChannel protocol is not used on the N Series.
Sent me an email and I will sent you additional informaton.
Oh … and it makes using Open Fabric Manager much easier when you use boot from SAN … ehh NFS.