How do I setup the SAN as a big share to be access from the guest OSs

[Frank1ro]

Hello... first post ever here so excuse me if it was already ask but so far I cannot find an answer.

We have a 12TB SAN that we would like to share witll all VMs on the virtual domain.

The SAN is a dell powervault MD3200i.

I read all about iSCSI configuration but all that does is give the esxi host access to the LUNs for vmotion and other vcenter features (done that).

What we need is to have our guest VM OSs access the logical 12TB drive space as a share drive.

Any ideas?

thank you.

P.S. I tried connecting to the SAN from the guest OS via iSCI but once MS iSCSI initiator connects and login to the IQN the local VM disk management cannot see the new volume/drive.

[AKostur]

Let's pretend that the guest VMs are all really physical boxes.  How would you get those physical hosts to share the SAN?  The VMs will have to do the same thing.  Unless your guest OSes understand how to share a single iSCSI LUN, using straight iSCSI won't work.  (Each VM will think it knows everything about the disk, and rampant disk corruption will occur).   You want something (perhaps the SAN itself) to export the space in some manner.  NFS, SMB, CIFS, whatever.  But not as a naked disk.

[Frank1ro]

So… if I take the NFS road will any of the following two work:

1. Have all VMs map the NFS share or

2. Have one VM map to the NFS and then share the folders and have the rest of the VMs access the shared folders

[AKostur]

Basically, yes.  Given a choice, I'd have the SAN deal with the NFS traffic directly instead of an extra VM in the middle of all of the disk transactions.

[MagnetBoy · Accepted solution]

1. Create a LUNa
   
2. add LUNa to the "storage group" in the SAN
   
3. add Datastore (LUNa) in vCenter formated as a VMFS (datastore-LUNa)
   
4. create a VM.
   
   1. OS setup, etc.
      
   2. add disk (vmdk)
      
      1. select location "Datastore-LUNa"
         
      2. Max size or you can create several smaller vmdks in "datastore-LUNa"
         
      3. select different SCSI controller:
         
         1. OS(vmdk1)      = 0:0    [datastore-LUN-OSs)
            
         2. data1(vmdk1)   = 1:0   [datastore-LUNa)
            
         3. data2(vmdk2)   = 2:0   [datastore-LUNa)
            
         4. etc.
            
      4. login to the guest OS
         
      5. Computer manager
         
      6. 1. turn on disk
            
         2. initialize
            
         3. etc.
            
   3. Enable the role "File Server" in the VM's guest OS
      
      1. create shares as many as you want!
         

[Frank1ro]

It worked great.

After I created a "host port identifier" and a vmware group at the storage device and then following the rest of your suggestions iSCSI adapter was able to detect the SAN luns.

Thank you.

[MagnetBoy]

I am glad it worked, have a good day!