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tdubb123
Expert
Expert

The initiator could not establish a network connection to the target

Whenever I rescan iscsi hba, I keep getting this message in the events tab

Login to iSCSI target

iqn...... on vmhba40@vmk2 failed. The iscsi initiator could not establish a network connection to the target.

any idea why? The lun is online and accessible though

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

From ESXi can you ping the SAN, and then from the SAN ping ESXi?  How is your networking setup for the vmkernel port(s) on ESXi?

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tdubb123
Expert
Expert

Dave

Yes I am able to ping the san from both esxi and vice versa with jumbo frames.
Right now I have one dvswitch and 2 iscsi port groups with 2 nics on this dvs.
vmk1 is on pg1 binded to nic1 and nic2 is unused
vmk2 is on pg2 binded to nic2 and nic1 is unused.
Is it necessary to create separate vswitches for the 2 vmks?
thanks
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tdubb123
Expert
Expert

Dave

Ys I am able to ping the san from both esxi and vice versa with jumbo frames.

Right now I have one dvswitch and 2 iscsi port groups with 2 nics on this dvs.

vmk1 is on pg1 binded to nic1 and nic2 is unused

vmk2 is on pg2 binded to nic2 and nic1 is unused.

Is it necessary to create separate vswitches for the 2 vmks?

thanks

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waynej
Contributor
Contributor

I have the same issue and it appears the errors are mostly annoying rather than harmful. 

I also have two separate iSCSI VLANs that aren't routed.  I have a single vDS and do port binding according to the best practices -- essentially what you have described.

vmk1 is on VLAN1 and vmk2 is on VLAN2.  The EMC VNX array has ports a4 and b4 on VLAN1 and a5 and b5 on VLAN2.  When ESXi 5.1 boots up, the host attempts to connect to all array ports via both VLANs.  Which means obviously that the connections to a5 and b5 on VLAN1 via vmk1 fail and a4 and b4 on VLAN2 via vmk2 fail. 

Is this just a stupid error? 

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SparkRezaRafiee
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I know this thread has been created a long time ago but still there are some people have this issue.

That can be due to iSCSI login timeout.

I had the same issue and managed to resolve it by tuning the iSCSI login timeout from 5 sec (Default) to 30 seconds and also changing NOOP Intervals and NOOP timeout values to 30 seconds.

But as long as the both VMKs are active and there is no dead paths to the iSCSI targets and also all paths are visible, assuming that you have already checked the network IP addresses, subnet mask and MTU size, the alert can be ignored.

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azr2d1
Contributor
Contributor

Glad I found this posting.

I have the same issue. I did notice that I can NOT ping the addresses on the iscsi target but also not on the esxi side !

I am thinking I have the ip addresses set wrong.

So my main network is on 192.168.1.xxx

I have a dedicated nic which I set to 192.168.2.160  (should this be on the 192.168.1.xxx network?)

So, I can't ping this ipaddress , it says unreachable.

On the iSCSI target I have it set to 192.168.2.99   Is this correct? Should it also beon 192.168.1.xxxx ?????

The weird thing is is that my static targets do show up. I iSCSI target is on a synology 1618+. It has 4 nic's, 1 is to my network and works fine (ip is 192.168.1.102)

Hope someone knowledgable is still watching this.

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daphnissov
Immortal
Immortal

You appear to have networking issues, but based on your description alone it's hard to say. You either need to fully and completely describe all your networking that's in play here, or post ample screenshots that show this. iSCSI can be done several different ways, so without know what you have and how it's connected and configured, it's very difficult to pinpoint issues.

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SparkRezaRafiee
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

As Daphnissov advised, iSCSI can be set up in different ways but the best way to set iSCSI up would be to put it on layer 2 connected network. So the iSCSI initiator and the iSCSI targets should be on the same subnet with MTU size of 9000. to create redundancy, you will need to different subnets, uplinks, initiators and targets.

But in any kind of depolyment, you should be able to have ping coming and going between iSCSI initiator and the storage. So if you cannot ping the iSCSI sotrage from the ESXi host using vmkping then the first step would be to fix network connectivity. So check physical network connectivity, VMK0, iSCSI initiators, MTU, configuration on iSCSI storage, etc.

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