Need advice on setting up ESX 3.5 on c7000 HP Chassis - boot from SAN

[ashishpotluri]

When setting up ESX 3.5 on c7000 HP chassis w/BL460c g1 blades, what are best practice on configuring Boot from SAN for Qlogic 373i controllers? With the Qlogic HBAs, we normally boot from SAN with port 1 configured to boot and Port 2 disabled. My VMware guy wants me to enable both ports and boot from both ports. I was told this is not a good idea, but I cannot remember why? Are there docs for best practices?

[kjb007]

For redundancy sake, you want to have both paths available to you in case of failures. Typically, you'd split your paths, one going to one fabric, the other going to the 2nd. You want to enable the boot bios on both, and configure your boot LUN. Works well.

-KjB

[smudger]

Hi,

Just to add to that, HP recently released a "Best practices for VMware ESX3.5 using c-Class Blades, EVA & Virtual Connect" white paper. It is very HP centric - EVA, virtual connect etc but is worth a read and has some good background.

The paper can be found here -

Neil