Present iSCSI Target to Guest OS

[musc_county_is]

We are running ESXi 5.0 U2 in a clustered environment and would like to present a target on a separate SAN to a guest OS for testing purposes.

Is it possible to present an iSCSI target directly to a guest OS for direct storage access?  If so, would you provide details or documentation?

[AKostur]

I'm curious as to why it would be any different than attempting to present the target to any other OS.  Set up the iSCSI initiator in your guest OS to point at your iSCSI target.  The fact that it's a VM should be irrelevant.  Now, depending on your networking setup, you may want to add a second NIC to your VM to live on whatever VLAN your SAN lives on so as to not have your iSCSI traffic have to cross a router.

[a_p_]

There's nothing special you need to do other than to install an iSCSI initiator in the guest OS, present the LUN on the storage system to the guest and ensure the guest has network access to the storage system through it's virtual network adapter. The ESXi host itself is not involved, except for providing the appropriate Virtual Machine network port group.

André

[rickardnobel]

musc_county_is wrote:

We are running ESXi 5.0 U2 in a clustered environment and would like to present a target on a separate SAN to a guest OS for testing purposes.

As noted above, if the VM has the network access and the SAN is configured to allow the VM iSCSI initiator you just do the usual iSCSI configuration on the specific guest operating system.

Be aware however that this setup in my opinion causes a higher risk at the environment. You typically want the storage network as isolated as possible, and if you allow VMs to directly connect to the storage LAN there are increased risk of unstability of the whole storage system.

A single VM could for example by mistake set the same IP address as the iSCSI target, causing IP conflicts and possible bringing down all storage access for all hosts.

[musc_county_is]

Thank you for your advice.

Our current physical and virtual iSCSI network is isolated from our physical and virtual production network.  Will we need to add a virtual machine port group to the current iSCSI virtual switch in order to have our test system connect to the SAN directly or will this cause problems (see images) on the iSCSI network?

[vHaridas]

Hi,

to keep Virtual Machine iSCSI traffic different, create new Virtual Machine port group, add new NIC in vm and assign new Virtual Machine port group. and then configure iSCSI as you do on any other system.

Thanks,

Haridas

[musc_county_is]

Thank you.  we hadn't changed the network configurations for so long, we were drawing a blank on the best way to create this test.