ESXi Fibre Channel SAN Requirements

In preparation for configuring your SAN and setting up your ESXi system to use SAN storage, review the requirements and recommendations.

• Make sure that ESXi systems support the SAN storage hardware and firmware combinations you use. For an up-to-date list, see the VMware Compatibility Guide.
• Configure your system to have only one VMFS volume per LUN.
• Unless you are using diskless servers, do not set up the diagnostic partition on a SAN LUN.

  If you use diskless servers that boot from a SAN, a shared diagnostic partition is appropriate.

• Use RDMs to access raw disks. For information, see Raw Device Mapping.
• For multipathing to work properly, each LUN must present the same LUN ID number to all ESXi hosts.
• Make sure that the storage device driver specifies a large enough queue. You can set the queue depth for the physical HBA during a system setup.
• VMtools increases the default disk timeout SCSI TimeoutValue parameter to 180 seconds. On virtual machines without VMtools, increase the value of the SCSI TimeoutValue parameter. With this parameter set up, the VMs can better tolerate delayed I/O resulting from a path failover. For information, see Set Timeout on Windows Guest OS or the KB 1009465.