I'm investigating the possibility of booting from SAN on our new R620s. I have been able to get it to work on our 2950s by configuring the HBAs to initialize a LUN on our SAN and then booting the server from the Windows 2008 R2 CD and then initiating the install to the LUN on the SAN.
The problem I'm having with the R620s is that there is no boot select menu (I can only choose preferred boot order). Regardless of what I choose or what bios settings, I initiate, if the HBA is connected to the SAN when the server boots and initializes devices, the server will get stuck on "scanning devices" and I have not been able to find a way to boot from CD besides disconnecting the HBAs. That however means that the LUN is not availble to install Server 2008 R2 from the CD.
I have tried every permutation of boot order and disabling all devices aside from the optical drive but R620s still hang on "scanning devices". On the 2950s, it was a simple step of accessing the boot menu and forcing a boot from CD. I haven't found a similar option on R620s. Does anybody have any input?
Thanks.