Thecus N7700Pro - iSCSI - Only one disk shown in VMware vSphere

    • Offizieller Beitrag

    I had the problem that I wanted to connect 2 iSCSI Target to a VMware vSphere Host from 2 different RAID-Arrays. And it didn't work as expected.
    If found a pretty neat solution on a Amazon Review for the device.


    Here is the solution:


    Zitat

    Lastly - I did mention a little caveat for VMware iSCSI users. I did spend many hours frustrated and confused as to what the heck was going on. Essentially my goal was to provide my vSphere environment with iSCSI targets from both N7700 devices. Seemed easy enough - create 2TB targets (VMware limit...damnit) on each device, then add the datastores to the environment. For simplicity's sake, I will call them Target 1A and Target 2A (device 1 and device 2). So you'd expect to be able to go to the VI client - scan for new storage (after iSCSI configuration) and be presented with two targets - one from each device. Well that's not what happened. What happened is I was presented with one target that contained two paths (as if multipathing was enabled). After much research and head banging, I found out that the problem lies in the way the N7700s create the target path. Even though you use unique names/LUNs/iqn info/etc, the N7700 is hard coded to use the same name during the iSCSI target full name generation. So when you create Target 1 on device 1 and then create Target 1 on device 2, if you break down the name that's created, you'll see one portion is identical - which is what VMware apparently uses to identify storage. And unfortunately, there is no way to edit this name that's been generated. VERY LAME!


    Thankfully there is a decent working, permanent solution. First - create all the iSCSI targets you want on the first device. For example, if you want 4 targets on device 1 and 4 targets on device 2 - you create the first four targets on device one. Then you create four 'bogus' targets on device 2. After the bogus targets are created, create your 'actual' targets, the ones you intend to keep. Once that's done - delete the 'bogus' targets. What that does is - eliminates the indentical name mapping off the second device, since by then, you will be on Targets 5-8 rather than 1-4. Sounds lame - but it definitely works and it stays working even through N7700 reboots and VMware host reboots. Other than that initial trick configuration - it will act as expected and all will be as expected.

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