I was recently setting some ESX servers an with Equallogic storage. In the past this used to be a pretty tedious thing.
You had to configure the storage then configure vswitches, enable iscsi, set mtu, map vmknics to iscsi vmhba etc etc...
Well I tried the tools that equallogic is providing. Wow.... I was impressed.
First you configure the storage... we are talking basic configuration just IP addresses and stuff no luns yet.
You then download EqualLogic Multipathing Extension Module for VMware® vSphere and install VMA
use winscp to copy this to VMA, remember to chmod them to make the files executable and then its just this:
if you have enterprise or higher license you can use the MPIO from Equallogic.
To install it its just.
./setup.pl --install --server=ip-address
you will need to provide password for the server (you can also insert it onto the command but I tend to preffer to do it manually... less history)
that does that bit... then the really cool bit was running. For this you do not need an enterprise license its just a config script.
./setup.pl --configure --server=ip-address
again you can do it on 1 line but its pretty long and answerring the prompts takes seconds.
This will do EVERYTHING for you. It will create your ISCSI switches, set mtu create vmknics, assign them ip addresses, map them out etc etc...absolutelly brilliant!
Finally if you have about 15 GB of space on your storage you can install the VMware Host Integration Toolkit. You will need to set up a VM portgroup on your iscsi vswitch. It also does not requiere a enterprise license.
This is a VM that needs so configuration from its console. It has a text gui that is pretty basic. Setup IP addresses, names etc etc. At the end it lets you install a plugin into vCenter. After that forget about it.
From vCenter you now have a equallogic plugin. From here you can create datastores assign them to servers, expand them etc etc.
It just makes the whole setup, configure and maintenance of Vmware with Equallogic so much easier. It even allows you to add storage speace from the Vms... completelly integrated!
sometimes they get it right!
