Boot from SAN, yes or no ??

[Walter Dey]

I see more and more partners and customers, that oppose to do boot from a network (be it FC, FCoE, iSCSI, PXE); they prefer installation on local disk, USB and / or SD. Any feedback from the field.

One should also be aware, that W2012 (R2) we SMB V3 storage (pushed by MSFT of course) doesn't support boot over the network; W2012 has to be installed on a local device.

Walter.

[richbarb]

Walter,

The problem in not use boot from SAN is the data management, is decentralized. (I'm not talking about performance yet).

So far, I never did a deploy of UCS with boot from local disks, all booting from SAN (FC,FCoE,iSCSI).

Is there better place to keep data than a storage?

Using boot from SAN and Service Profiles of UCS, you can delivery a solution than can restore any server in minutes without stress.

Of course, if we talking a very small deployment, the boot from SAN doesn't make a big impact.

[Jeremy Waldrop]

Boot from SAN is not boot from network. To the host OS a boot from SAN LUN is a local disk.

99.9% of our customers are boot from SAN, this includes mostly vSphere but we do have some Hyper-V customers that are boot from SAN for Windows 2008/2012 R2 Hyper-V hosts.