MSCS and Booting from a SAN

You can put the boot disk of a virtual machine on a SAN-based VMFS volume.

Booting from a SAN is complex. Problems that you encounter in physical environments extend to virtual environments. For general information about booting from a SAN, see the vSphere Storage documentation.

Follow these guidelines when you place the boot disk of a virtual machine on a SAN-based VMFS volume:

• Consider the best practices for boot-from-SAN that Microsoft publishes in the following knowledge base article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/305547/en-us.
• Use StorPort LSI Logic drivers instead of SCSIport drivers when running Microsoft Cluster Service for Windows Server 2003 or 2008 guest operating systems.
• Test clustered configurations in different failover scenarios before you put them into production environments.