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ESX on the IBM System i

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New CEC

Posted by dave@NLC Jan 7, 2009


We installed our new Power 520 last night. First one in the State of ME! And I had things to fix in ESX.

When my ESX Hosts came up, I received an error on the console, I forget what it said, but I can tell you what you need to do ;)

The reason there was a problem, the HBA in the System i was moved. ESX thought I had attaches a SAN snapshot to the host, and it didn't see the original LUNS.

I had to resignatue the Storage. Go to Configuration, Advanced Settings, LVM, and change the Resignature to 1. Rescan, then change it back to 0. Now I don't know if I could have one this easier, but I didn't have many VM's, so I just removed all the unknow VM's from Inventory and added them back. It only took a few minutes.

I knew I was going to run into this, because I moved the HBA one time, a few months ago, and I had the same problem.

All in all, everything went great, now I need to find out if you can do System i Integration with a VIOS Partition.

I want to let anyone who is interested know that I started a group on LinkedIn for System i Integration with BladeCenter and System x. I'm hoping to get some people from the IBM Development team, some RedBook authors, Advanced Tech Support, etc people to join.



Jan 28, 2009 3:19 PM vm400

Dave,

I am also working with a System I, but it is on 5r4 so not all of the cool stuff is supported. So as a work around for the moment I am just trying to use the I-series as a SAN through the ISCSI adapters. Do you have any input on doing this? I have ESX installed on a 3650 with it's own internal drives, and I want to use a slice of space off of the I-series.

Thanks

Jan 28, 2009 5:01 PM dave@NLC in response to: vm400

I will first say that if I say something "won't work" what I really mean is it's not supported :)

If you're booting off internal disks then connecting to the iSeries via iSCSI won't work. But one thing you can do if mount an NFS Share. I'd have to brush up on exactly how to do this...I did it back in 2003 when I needed to have an AIX box connect to the 400. And you would want to save yourself some trouble by creating a user named root on the 400, and give it the same password as the ESX Host.

I'll try to find some information on creating an NFS Share on the System i, I can try doing it on my box as well.

And do everything you can to go to 6.1, it's great in every way!!

Jan 28, 2009 5:17 PM dave@NLC in response to: vm400

Well, that didn't take long. That won't work. ESX requires NFS mount version 3 over TCP. The System i uses an older version, and I'm still running into problems with the IFS not supporting files larger than 4GB in the Integrated Server environment. i.e. in 6.1 you can do file level backups of Linux Servers, but not files larger than 4GB. This was a limitation in previous versions of Windows Integration, so it looks like they still have some things to fix.

The other thing you could do, take a Windows Integrated Server, and use Microsoft's Services for UNIX NFS Server. That does work.

If I come up with any other ideas then I'll let you know.

Jan 29, 2009 8:10 AM vm400 in response to: dave@NLC

Thanks for all of the input. I would probably be better off to get more space on our SAN and go that route. We were trying to keep everything on the I-series in order to have a single set of backup tapes for disaster recovery.

Jan 29, 2009 8:14 AM dave@NLC in response to: vm400

That's why the Integration is such a good solution!

What you could do, is take one integrated Server, use that as your VCB Proxy Server, then you can get everything on that one tape, even if the ESX Hosts are using internal disk.

If you want I can post how I'm doing it all.

Jan 29, 2009 8:24 AM vm400 in response to: dave@NLC

I sent you a PM.

Jul 14, 2009 11:28 AM ccandia in response to: dave@NLC

Did you guys ever figure out a way to use the NFS server in IBM i to host storage for ESX?

Jul 14, 2009 11:50 AM dave@NLC in response to: ccandia

No, what I found was that the NFS protocol that the system i uses is an old version, I don't remember the version that it uses, and ESX needs a newer version. It would probably work using AIX, but I don't have one to play around with :)

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dave@NLC

 Member since: Aug 22, 2008

This is all about my experiences running ESX on IBM BladeCenter and System x integration with IBM System i

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