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pdarcy
Contributor
Contributor

Disable Broadcom 5709 TOE and ISCSI

Hi

I have two sites Production and DR, both sites have 3 ESXi hosts and I am currently configuring SRM from unidirectional failover.

All of the hosts have broadcom 5709 NICs, 5 of the hosts have 4 onboard nics and 1 of the hosts has 8 onboard NICs (Dell R810).

The broadcom 5709 NICs by default in ESXi are provided with an iSCSI iqn and are enabled. ISCSI cannot be disabled in the GUI and I cannot find a way in the CLI to disable it either.

So in total I have 18 iSCSI initator on the DR site connecting to the LUNs.

There seems to be a limitation of the Equallogic of a max of 16 iqn's per LUN.

Unfortunatley when SRM completes a Test Failover it tries to register all 18 of the iqns to each LUN even though I only have 6 NICs  with iSCSI initators connected to the iSCSI network.

It then fails stating the "maximum number of access records reached" in the SRM logs.

I have tried to disable iSCSI in the BIOS of the NICs and but this only seems to affect iSCSI boot setting.

Has anyone seen this issue before and successfully disabled the iSCSI Hardware initators in these NICs?

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vCLS
Contributor
Contributor

I have the exact same issue.  Did you find a resolution?

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pdarcy
Contributor
Contributor

Yes, the resolution was not an easy one and it carried out by VMware. You will have to log a call with VMware support and they will carry out the fix for you.

Sorry I cant help any more but it was outside my hands.

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malaysiavm
Expert
Expert

do you mean your broadcom 5709 is a hardward iscsci? just curious if you are using software ISCSI, why it will enable the iscsi by default. Can you share more?

Craig vExpert 2009 & 2010 Netapp NCIE, NCDA 8.0.1 Malaysia VMware Communities - http://www.malaysiavm.com
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pdarcy
Contributor
Contributor

Hi

Yes the Braodcom is a hardware initiator. From ESX 4.1 any TOE enabled NIC is viewed as an ISCSI initiator and is enabled by default. You are not able to disable it.

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dirch201110141
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Bumb. Anything new on this front, fx with 5.0 ?

Have got several HP G7 490c with broadcom iSCSI adapter. The iSCSI adapters keeps popping up and spoils attemps to test and use a host profile. The easy way of disabling the adapter has been without succes Smiley Sad

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