SAN Boot Policy Clarification

[Terry MacDougal]

I would like some clarification regarding the SAN Boot policy. I was always under the impression you were suppose to use the WWPN of the storage port. But what if you have many storage ports coming from the array (16 for example), this would not be possible.

Is the purpose of this  policy to simply force the HBA to login into the SAN fabric?

If so, I can use one from my  actual array or just make one up, correct?

Since all the zoning is being done by the SAN switch (Brocade/MDS/Nexus) and LUN masking at the array level, I would think putting the actual WWPN of a storage port is not necessary.

Thanks for any clarification.

[ssumichrast]

My thought was you could just throw a valid wwpn in (any valid wwpn, doesn't have to be the array) again just to log in to the fabric. The it would scan the bus and off you go.

When I tried that with our try and buy setup and a NetApp array, doing windows 2008 r2 san boot, I could never get the luns to show up.  We put in the arrays 4 wwpns and that got it to show up.

im not sure why it matters, and I think we had something else wrong.  if you look at blogs online almost all of them show to just throw a wwpn in there to start flogi and that's it.

If you have 16 wwpns that could be an issue.  As you probably know the boot policy only lets you put a primary and secondary for each HBA.  I would try placing a random wwpn in and see if it works.

[Tom MacDonald · Accepted solution]

Yes, a "fake" WWPN will work and they do successfully log in to the SAN Fabric...... Pics attached showing 2 ways of doing it....... However, if installing Windows 2012/Hyper-V I would suggest using valid WWPNs as it seems not to be able to handle the multipathing as ESX can during the initial install...