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What SAN booting is

SAN booting is the general term for booting a host from a storage system LUN instead of an internal hard disk.

Fibre Channel SAN booting does not require support for special SCSI operations; it is not different from any other SCSI disk operation. The HBA uses special code in the BIOS that enables the host to boot from a LUN on the storage system.

iSCSI SAN booting also uses special code in the BIOS that enables the host to boot from a LUN on the storage system. You need to set specific parameters in the BIOS to enable iSCSI SAN booting.

The general process is as follows.

  1. After the HBA has accessed the BIOS, use the Emulex or QLogic BootBIOS utility to configure the LUN as a boot device.
  2. Configure the PC BIOS to make the LUN the first disk device in the boot order.
  3. Install the following on the LUN.
    • Windows operating system
    • HBA driver
Note: Following a system failure, the bootable virtual disk is no longer the default boot device. You need to reconfigure the hard disk sequence in the system BIOS to set the bootable virtual disk as the default boot device.