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Draconis
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Unable to concurrently mount multiple iSCSI targets from a single iSCSI SAN

Hi Guys,

I have recently deployed FreeNAS 8.0.3 as a practice lab iSCSI SAN on one of my HP Proliant Microservers.  The first target is a physical disk extent since it was noted that disk is faster than the file extents.  I setup the Software Initiator for Dynamic Discovery and found it.  I built vCenter on it.  It was pretty slow going seeing that it was also on a 100Mb network.  I decided to purchase a gigabit switch and a 240GB SSD drive.  I added the SSD as another target.  However, I cant mount both datastores at the same time.  Am I missing something?  Both are noted under the iSCSI Software Initiator...

Connected Targets:  2

Devices:  1

Paths:  2

When I actually go to Paths, I see both targets but only one can be Active (I/O) and the other is Active.  To switch between the datastores, I have been forced to disable the currently Active (I/O) one and reenable to failover to the other.  I would like both targets mounted at the same time.  How do I go about doing this?  Thanks for any help.

Mark

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peterdabr
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My apologies in advance if  I'm misunderstanding something in the problem description, but it seems like you only have 1 "Device" meaning one block-level ( iscsi) LUN presented through two separate iscsi targets (two separate iqn/IP cobinations). You can only have one VMFS datastore per LUN so I'm little confused with your statement "I can't mount both datastores at the same time"...

Peter D

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peterdabr
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My apologies in advance if  I'm misunderstanding something in the problem description, but it seems like you only have 1 "Device" meaning one block-level ( iscsi) LUN presented through two separate iscsi targets (two separate iqn/IP cobinations). You can only have one VMFS datastore per LUN so I'm little confused with your statement "I can't mount both datastores at the same time"...

Peter D

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rickardnobel
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Mark wrote:

I would like both targets mounted at the same time.  How do I go about doing this? 

Do you have the new disk attached as a LUN on the iSCSI Target device? Is this LUN number visible in ESXi when you click the Software iSCSI adapter (usually vmhba33) in Storage Adapters?

Can't you present the new LUN from the same target as the first disk?

My VMware blog: www.rickardnobel.se
Draconis
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I have 2 targets on FreeNAS 8.0.3.  When I configure my iSCSI initiator to Dynamic Discovery, it finds both targets.  But, under the information for the iSCSI initiator, only one is marked as Active (I/O) and the other as Active.  My guess is that only an Active (I/O) can be mounted at a time.  But the target associations are for 2 completely different disk extents with 2 different targets.  They should be completely 2 different LUNS.  I am in the middle of upgrading to the next version of FreeNAS 8.0.4 to see if that resolves it.  Unfortunately, I cannot use Openfiler 2.99 just yet since I dont have a free 16GB flash drive to install the OS on. I might install Openfiler 2.99 to test.

Do you happen to know which Guest Operating System Openfiler 2.99 should fall under?

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Draconis
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Nice.  That was it.  After I upgraded my FreeNAS' version to 8.0.4, I was able to see 2 devices and 2 paths instead of 1 device and 2 paths.  Weird that it would give me 2 LUNs but only register it as one device.  Thanks much.

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peterdabr
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Nice. I'm glad that you got it resolved.

Quick note with regards to software-based iscsi targets and dynamic discovery. When iscsi target is multi-homed, when initiator send 'SendTargets' commands, target replies back with all IPs of the machine and some of those IPs/networks may not be accessible to the intiator but they will all get added under Dynamic Discovery tab on the esx host.  I always find it a good practice to manually configure all accessible targets under Static Discovery tab; this way the intiator will never attempt connecting to the targets that it can't get to.

Best,

Peter D.

Draconis
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Thank you.  I actually tried the Static Discovery as part of my test but I figured the Dynamic was best for now.  However, I will be testing out multihomed in the upcoming weeks for different scenarios and this will definitely be helpful.  I was just going to keep the Dynamic but seeing that that might cause issues, I will be converting to static.  Thanks so much to the both of you.  My environment is shaping up to what I was hoping it to.  Smiley Happy

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