Boot from SAN using Flex fabric

[Gene Kenny]

I am trying to boot from SAN using an EVA and Flex Fabric. Below are the steps I have taken.

1. On the Emluex bios I enabled boot from san
2. I took the Emulex wwid’s and manually  created a host  by entering the Emulex wwid’s
3. Presented the lun to the new host
4. Went into the Flex Fabric and selected primary and secondary added two of the EVA port wwids into the primary and secondary section of the gui, for the Boot Target name.
5. Went into the server bios and moved the boot order so the Emulex is first and second, and the smart array is third.

I do not have any zoning setup at this time. My questions are around the Flexfabric.

If I leave the default setting of Use Bios will the boot process by-pass the Flexfabric?

Or do I need to setup the primary and secondary with a target port name?

[Casper42]

The value of VC is that you could have put the target WWPN and LUN ID into the Profile instead of manually configuring the Emulex BIOS. Next boot, VC would have programmed all that into the Emulex for you.
If you leave it set as USE BIOS you should be fine, but if you ever move the VC Profile to another bay those Emulex BIOS settings are kept on the old machine because you did it manually.

You still need to adjust the boot order in the BIOS manually so that was a good call. If you don't plan to use the internal drive bays at all there is another BIOS setting that will allow you to disable the Smart Array controller as well.