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arxon
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Problem when adding 2nd host in the shared Iscsi Storage

Hello People.

I will try to explain you exactly my problem although it is a liitle bit difficult!!

First of all we are talking for a test enviroment which is setup in my home just for learning purposes.

I face a strange behaviour of my iscsi storage when i try to attach a second host to the storage for purposes of vmotion.I was using an Esx host (3.5) for a while and i had no problem with the iscsi storage(I use an old pc with freenas on it) . I have to clarify that in this host i was lucky enough that also the local sata controllers were recognized so i could test the Storage Vmotion between the two storages(local and iscsi ) with success.

In order to continue to learn i decided to buy also another pc to test Vmotion,Ha clustering,DRS.Unfortunately I couldn't find the same hardware and that had as a result that sata controllers not to be recognized ,so i used an ata disk for OS and my intention was to use iscsi storage for the vmfs3 volume.

In the first esx host i was using ,you can see 3 storage adapters:vmhba32,vmhba33>local sata controllers ,,, vmhba34>iscsi software initiator

In the second esx host you can see only the vmhba32--> iscsi software initiator.

The first time everything worked ok ,meaning that i attached the iscsi storage in the2nd host only by rescaning the vmhba and i was able to browse the datstore and see the contents of it but this lasted only for 10 minutes.Then unexpectedly i lost the connection to common storage to both hosts,i could see it in the storage adapters section but when i pressed refresh in the storage section nothing happened and even when i was trying to add it again using the add storage i was getting the usual message "unable to read information from partition table".After being a little bit more careful i noticed that in the storage adapters section I could see the same vmhba34 in both hosts with the same alias of the first host and here comes the most strange part ,the situation i described above was changing from time to time meaning that some times i could see the vmhba32 in both hosts and after a while vmhba34 in both hosts!!!!!!!(crazy stuff)

I took the big decision after playing with the partition table with no effect to use the "vmkfstool -C vmfs3 -S "_free"_ /vmfs/devices/disks/vmhba32:0:0:1" command

in the second host,ofcourse i lost all the data but now with a simple refresh in this host i was able to see the storage.

Unfortunately i still couldn' access the storage from the 1st host and i issued the same command "vmkfstool -C vmfs3 -S "free" /vmfs/devices/disks/vmhba34:0:0:1"

with only the change you see in bold .This had as a result to see the storage after a refresh with the name of free (1) .

Now currently it is working for 2 days with this unrecommended way Smiley Happy and what i really would appreciate is if could help me clarify what exactly is going on.

My main problem is that I am in front of a very unstable enviroment which may have as a result have the same problem unexpectedly in the future and i cannot reformat always the storage and losing all the VMs

I tried to describe the best i could this strange situation!!

Thanks for your time and any help or hint would be more than welcome!

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wolfgang123usa
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I was looking for similar solution. Seems to be only one iSCSI host is possible on freeNas. See here: http://apps.sourceforge.net/phpbb/freenas/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=403&sid=f4881e6e25e752e6ee8c6b0eae588...

The only solution for learning seems to be to install the ESX or ESXi server in a VM and then use iSCSI Vm. Instructions for complete setup here (you need all 6 pdf files) http://knowledge.xtravirt.com/white-papers/esx-3x.html or you can replace the opnefiler with the iSCSI VM from SUN. http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/resources.jsp , you need to use the converter from vmware to convert the SUN VM to be used in ESX found this in a forum...but can not find URL anymore. I have not tried myself yet, just researching because want to get a similar setup.

//Wolfgang

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wolfgang123usa
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I was looking for similar solution. Seems to be only one iSCSI host is possible on freeNas. See here: http://apps.sourceforge.net/phpbb/freenas/viewtopic.php?f=53&t=403&sid=f4881e6e25e752e6ee8c6b0eae588...

The only solution for learning seems to be to install the ESX or ESXi server in a VM and then use iSCSI Vm. Instructions for complete setup here (you need all 6 pdf files) http://knowledge.xtravirt.com/white-papers/esx-3x.html or you can replace the opnefiler with the iSCSI VM from SUN. http://www.sun.com/storage/disk_systems/unified_storage/resources.jsp , you need to use the converter from vmware to convert the SUN VM to be used in ESX found this in a forum...but can not find URL anymore. I have not tried myself yet, just researching because want to get a similar setup.

//Wolfgang

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arxon
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First of all THANKS WOLFGANG for your reply.

At last someone to give a true guideline so i can search it further and find a solution.

I was wondering if i can change the displayed number of the vmhba in the second host to appear as vmhba34 instead of vmhba32 so as both esx hosts use the same vmhba number for iscsi software initiator,the idea is that this difference maybe causes some kind of conflict and

thus having this unstable enviroment.Anyhow i found some answers on that but sadly they were applicable only in esx 2.5.

Is someone aware how to change this parameter ?

Thanks

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