Boot-from SAN with host profiles/auto-deploy

[scole7626]

My team is currently working on deploying vSphere 6.  We are wanting to move to boot from SAN in our UCS environment.  We have (2) CS-500 FC arrays that are in a cluster together.  I have presented a boot volume, then the guy building the server installed ESX and it installed and worked perfectly.  The problem is that we want to create host profiles to be able to apply to the other 35 hosts so I can build all the volumes and assign the datastores in one large automated batch.  How do we determine within the host profile to look for a specific volume on the Nimble?  We can't give it the wwn because it will be different for every boot volume.  I have 10 different datastore volumes that will be shared among the hosts all from the Nimble cluster.  I need to know how to determine to tell the host that is being installed how to find its boot volume.

[#2]

Stanton,

Not sure if you are referring to UCS Service profiles with a SANboot policy or ESXi host profiles (or both).  But in any case you should be fine.   Let me dive into some details.

1) There is a single WWNN / WWPN name space with Nimble Storage.  So all FC zoning is predicable for every UCS blade /ESX host. (Uses the same target WWPNs in every case)

2) Volume (LUN) masking is done at the initiatorgroup level. 

3) For boot volumes, every initiatorgroup on the Nimble side needs to only include the WWPNs from the correct Service Profile / ESXi host.

4) Boot volumes are typically all mapped to the same LUN id (0).  

-> This allows you to use the same LUN id for the UCS service boot policy (or ESXi host profile) regardless of how many boot volumes are created.

So long story short, the only thing you need to worry about with the volume creation is just to have an individual initiatorgroup for every Service Profile.  

Here is a reference on the UCS side of the house which will show you how to setup appropriate zoning and boot policy.

https://www.nimblestorage.com/Nimble-Storage-SmartStack-FC-GSG.pdf  (Reference figure 73 or 74)

Let Nimble Support know if you have any further questions.  We will be happy to help.