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tascheHyaene
Contributor
Contributor

iSCSI LUNs Vanish...

... without a trace.

I'm running two ESX 3.5 boxes hooked up to a number of EMC FC LUNs and four LUNs on a HP MSA2012i.

Came into work today, the four MSA2012i LUNs are offline.

A few things are sure:

The HP management utility sees the LUNs fine.

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tascheHyaene
Contributor
Contributor

.... sorry, tabbed and hit 'post message'.

Continued:

The HP mgmt utility can see the LUNs.

The ESX boxes can see the LUNs, but when I try to connect to them, I receive the error:

"Unable to read partition information from this disk"

in Virtual Center; both ESX boxes report the same error.

I'm a little puzzled as to why existing iSCSI LUNs would drop off the face of the earth like that. Most of my experience has been with FC, so I'm a bit of a dunce when it comes to iSCSI, please forgive me. There have been no major networking changes, no firmware/hardware/software upgrades.

Ideally I'd like to get the LUNs hung back on the ESX infrastructure and hopefully retrieve the data that was there.

Any ideas?

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Chamon
Commander
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When you say the esx hosts can see the storage where do they see them? In add storage? Are the LUNs shared to both ESX hosts? When you look at the /vmfs/volums/ do the luns show in red?

Anything under the iSCSI Adapter? Does it show the correct information? Can you vmkping the iSCSI host?

Message was edited by: Chamon

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tascheHyaene
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Hey Chamon, thx for a speedy reply....

The LUNs from the HP MSA2012i are visible to both ESX boxes in:

Configuration/Storage Controllers

Configuration/Storage

When I ssh into the box, the LUNs show up there in /vmfs/devices/disks in blue.

In /vmfs/volumes, they appear as something akin to:

47333198-xxxxxxxxx-d9b9-001cc45afc5b in blue.

...

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Chamon
Commander
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What are you doing when you get the error? Have you rescanned for the LUNs? any errors in /var/log/messages or /var/log/vmkernel

When you SSH can you drill all of the way into the vm directories?

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tascheHyaene
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Can't do anything when I get the error except cancel the "Add storage/LUNs" process.

Tail -f'd /var/log/messages and /var/log/vmkernel, retried the process, got nothing peculiar.

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tascheHyaene
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Yes, when I SSH in, I can see the contents of the vm directories when I drill down into the directories with the

47333199-xxxxxxx-d9b9-xxxxxxxx

naming convention.

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Chamon
Commander
Commander

can you

vmkping <ipaddress of iSCSI

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tascheHyaene
Contributor
Contributor

Yes, I can vmkping the iSCSI controller.

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Chamon
Commander
Commander

So it sees the LUNs and has access why are you trying to add them again? Are your vms not in VC and that is the problem? if so have you tried to re register the vms? Drill into the VM directory in the VIC and right click the vmx file for the vm that needs to be added back and choose add to inventory.

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tascheHyaene
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I can see the LUNs when I SSH into the ESX boxes, through the VC, no.

I can't re-register the VMs because I can't see them through the VC, or the ESX boxes themselves when I VIC directly to them.

Again, the original problem was that the iSCSI LUNs dropped from the VC. I agree it's odd that they can still be navigated to through the CLI, albeit with that strange directory naming convention, but they're still there and accessible via the CLI. I just can't access them through the VC. I receive the same error for each of the LUNs, the one about not being able to read partition information.

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tascheHyaene
Contributor
Contributor

Still got your ears on, Chamon?

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Chamon
Commander
Commander

Yep.

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Chamon
Commander
Commander

Have you tried masking the LUNs.Then rescan from the hosts and make sure that the LUNs are gone. Then re present the LUNs to the hosts and rescan again. The hosts may think that they are snapshot LUNs.

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tascheHyaene
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Contributor

Alright, sounds good.

I'm a noob w/ iSCSI - how do I go about masking the LUNs?

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tascheHyaene
Contributor
Contributor

Ok...

I turned down the HP MSA2012i completely, then rescanned the LUNs via the VIC. Once the iSCSI adapter showed no LUNs, I turned the HP MSA2012i back up, rescanned the bus and saw that the LUNs were back online. Tried adding them through the wizard:

Configuration->Storage->Add Storage->Disk/LUN

The LUNs were all listed, tried adding them one at a time and received the same error message:

Unable to read partition information from this disk.

The data on the LUNs is still visible and accessible via CLI in /vmfs/volumes.

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tascheHyaene
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Contributor

n/a

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tascheHyaene
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Contributor

n/a

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tascheHyaene
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n/a

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tascheHyaene
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n/a

Message was edited by: tascheHyaene

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