Help with using hardware iSCSI initiator

[rupeshdnair]

Hello All,

I am not sure if this is the right place..please pardon me if I am in the wrong community. I am a newbie to VMWare and trying to install my first VMWare server (ESX 4.0)...I have a HP DL 380 G6 server and a Equallogic PS 5000 storage array. I have a Qlogic QLE 4060C HBA card on the server. I successfully installed ESX 4 and when I logged into the service console thru VI Client and checked the configuration tab I could see the Qlogic HBA cards there. That means ESX did recogonize the HBA card. I setup a volume on the Equallogic box and setup access control using the IP address I setup for the Qlogic hba. But even after multiple reboots and rescans the hbs is unable to see the volume. Am I doing something wrong here? Is this the right way to install the HBA? Do I need to do something else to set this up? Any help/advice or pointers to any documentation is much appreciated.

Thanks and Regards,

Rupesh

[jbruelasdgo]

have you configured the VMkernel vSwitch for iSCSI?

and if so, have you configured your iSCSI initiator in the VI client?

regards

Jose Ruelas

[rupeshdnair]

If I am going to use the HBA to access the iSCSI disks, should I configure the vswitch for iSCSI? I thought we need to configure the vswitch for iSCSI only if we are going to use the software iSCSI initiator? Please correct me if I am wrong. To answer your question, No, I hadn't not configured the VMKernel vSwitch for iSCSI. I just configured VMKernel with an IP address in the same vswitch as service console. Tried to rescan all the HBA's....but still no luck...Do I need to install any specific drivers from QLogic to get it to work?

Rupesh

[rupeshdnair]

OK...so after I setup the VMKernel....I configured the software iSCSI initiator and entered the iSCSI target details under the Dynamic Discovery tab and it detected the volume I created on the equallogic array. So I supect that I am missing some configuration/setup with the Qlogic iSCSI HBA....Has anyone installed a hardware iSCSI HBA on ESX4?

Regards,

Rupesh

[Saju_C · Accepted solution]

Hi Rupesh

First of all, you dont need to configure vmkernel network for HWiSCSI. As you said, it is only required for SWiSCSI.

So, to configure HWiSCSI, make sure that you have provided the IP address, subnet etc on the iscsi adapter. If not, configure this first either thru vi/vc client or hwiscsi adapter bios. make sure that this IP address can talk to the iscsi storage network.

Now, from storage side, mape the iscsi lun to the HWiSCSI IQN. Provide the storage IP in discovery address(dynamic discovery) or storage ip and IQN ( Statici discovery)

Rescan the HBA and you should be able to see the luns.

Thanks

Saju

[rupeshdnair]

Hello Saju,

Thanks...one thing I did not actually check was the BIOS for the hardware HBA. I did check and configure all the settings from the BIOS of the HBA and now I got the HBA to see the iSCSI volume.

Now I've got another dilemma....whenever I've setup an iSCSI SANs for Windows servers, I've used a dedicated LAN card for the iSCSI traffic. I setup the LAN card with an IP address and subnet mask and without a default gateway (ie leave the default gateway blank) This way I could make sure the iSCSI traffic does not have to go thru the production LAN. But I could not do the same with the H/W HBA. It does not let me setup without a default gateway. Having said that how do I make sure I get a fast and reliable connection (without interferance from all the LAN traffic) between the HBA and the iSCSI target?

Thanks and Regards,

Rupesh

[Saju_C]

Hi

I dont have much idea as to why ur windows enviornment doent require gateway and HWiSCSi requires GW. I guess that might be related to your enviornment.

One difference with swiscsi and hwiscsi is that , in case of swiscsi , it is recommended to have a seperate service console port group which has access to your iscsi network . So normally, in case of swiscsi, a second service console is created whose IP will be in the iscsi network range. In case of HWiscsi, this is not required as HBA itself can process, manage and configure the iscsi packets. Also the most important thing is to have a completly isolated network for ur iscsi storage . This way you can make sure that none of the storage related packets are routed to the LAN traffic and none of the Lan traffic is routed to storage network.

Saju