Hello,
There seems to be a problem with the Dynamic Discovery of one of my esx hosts. I'm not complaining, as this is fun stuff, but I've spent a week trying to configure a system that involves:
- one iscsi target server
- two esx 3.5 update 3 hosts
For my storage server, I have W2k8 running with VMware Workstation 6.05 containing a guest for Windows Storage Server with the iSCSI Target Software snap-in. Ok, so I have actually been doing this for a couple weeks now, and have tried working with guests running Starwind, and OpenFiler, but no avail.
Here's the strange part... each of these iSCSI target solutions I have been able to connect with from the second esx host in the two that I have. Though I have never been able to connect each esx host to the same iSCSI serving machine, even separate targets on the machine. My current topology is like this:
- Storage Server
- W2k8 (dataserver.web-wired.com)
- VMware Workstation 6.05
- Guest 1: Windows Storage Server (iscsi00.web-wired.com)
- IQN: iqn.1991-05.com.web-wired:isz-iscsi00-isz-esx01.web-wired.com-target
- IP: 192.168.xxx.173
- Guest 2: Windows Storage Server (iscsi02.web-wired.com)
- IQN: iqn.1991-05.com.web-wired:isz-iscsi02-isz-esx02.web-wired.com-target
- IP: 192.168.xxx.175 - Host Server
- ESX 3.5 U3 (esx01.web-wired.com)
- IQN: iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:isz-esx01-3c3d8db5
- IP (Console, vmswitch0): 192.168.xxx.180
- IP (VMKernel, vmswitch1): 192.168.xxx.172
- Guest 1: W2k8 (SQL Server)
- ESX 3.5 U3 (esx02.web-wired.com)
- IQN: iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:isz-esx02-702b1e5d
- IP (Console, vmswitch0): 192.168.xxx.187
- IP (VMKernel, vmswitch1): 192.168.xxx.181
- Guest 1: W2k8 (Domain Controller)
- Guest 2: CentOS 5.2 (SVN, Apache, Trac, WebDav)
I'm sure everyone loves the rescan button, especially after 3-5 minutes just to see Send Targets = 0. With the above configuration, esx02 is able to discover iSCSI targets on iscsi02, but esx01 is never able to discover targets on iscsi00, nor iscsi02 if configured to. I once had esx01 talking to StarWind targets (running on dataserver.web-wired.com), while esx02 was talking to iscsi02 (and iscsi01 which was running OpenFiler), but then I was not able to get esx02 to find targets on StarWind.
So to conclude, the reason I have two virtual machines each running a copy of Windows Storage Server is because I have yet to get two individual ESX hosts to find iSCSI targets running on the same storage server, OpenFiler, Windows, StarWind, etc. It occurred to me that perhaps Virtual Center can't do this, hence the two separate servers, but that seems ridiculous, as who would want to shell out $ for two storage servers when one should do? Anyway, it doesn't seem that is the real problem, more like the problem is that VC, or the ESX host has a problem finding targets.
To further, in each Wndows Storage Server instance, in the iSCSI Targer Software snap-in, on the tab that show iSCSI Initiators, I am able to see and add the IQN of each ESX host. Furthermore, within a separate Vista client, I am able to connect the iSCSI Initiator to the target of each iSCSI server. So it seems the iSCSI servers are doing their job.
If I had to guess, the ESX host is caching a bogus, or obsolete target, and any new changes aren't persisting. Please help?
I do have some linux knowledge, enough to poke around and do some damage anyway, so if there are some bash commands that might help me to diagnose, or config files I should be inspecting, please advise.
Thanks!
