SRM, Equallogic and iSCSI Discovery Panel

[cdickerson]

So, got SRM and Equallogic SANs replicating and working good. I heard from Equallogic that one way to speed up the LUN discovery process is to go into the Configuration of the SAN, under Group Configuration-iSCSI tab and check "prevent unauthrozied hosts from discoverg targets". When you check this, only CHAP can be used to authorize LUNs to initiators. This does greatly speed up the storage rescan process, goes from about 4 minutes to 45 seconds. What I am finding is that when I do a Test Recovery in SRM, that the Equallogic SRA maps the temporary snapped volume that it presents to the ESX host with access setup to the initiator address of the ESX host. but since I have the "prevent unauthrozied hosts from discoverg targets" checked which only allows CHAP access, the ESX server is being denied access to the volume. Has anyone else tried this or seen this? Did I explaing good enough? I think this is a "feature" of the SRA and will have to take up with Equallogic but just wanted to get other thoughts first.

thanks.

-Craig

[MatthewCEvans]

We are also seeing a long delay in the LUN discovery process with EqualLogic SAN and SRM when configured with just iSCSI initiator name.

We also started testing SRM with CHAP authentication and found that SRM didn't work correctly (the volumes never mounted during failover testing). When following up with Dell/EqualLogic we were told that the EqualLogic SRA didn't support CHAP authentication at this point. We had to change back to iSCSI initiator name only to get things to work, but are having to put up with the long delays.

Matthew Evans

Kraft & Kennedy, Inc.

360 Lexington Ave.

New York, NY 10017

Direct: 212.692.5608

email: evans@kraftkennedy.com

[cdickerson]

cool thanks for the info.