VMware Cloud Community
RiderFaiz
Contributor
Contributor
‎07-20-2016 03:30 PM

Running MPIO on VM Windows 2012R2

hi everyone,

I just learned about MPIO..... I like to ask:

Currently I have three hosts running vcenter and connecting to a iSCSI (I also had a san). The iSCSI itself has only 2 10g ports for load balancing. Anyway....

I like to ask if I have a vm running Windows 2012 R2 that is the one connecting iSCSI ( a not expensive one by Seagate...more like a NAS). Do you think if I can configure MPIO on the client to take advantage of the MPIO performance enhancement?

I saw one post MPIO inside a guest vm?   and it said I could not do that...just want to confirm... I am not very good at iSCSI technology still Smiley Happy

Thank you for your help.


Takami Chiro

0 Kudos
3 Replies
ThompsG
Virtuoso
Virtuoso
‎07-24-2016 11:02 PM

Hi Takami,

The article you reference says it is not support. That is a long way away from doesn't work. If you design it correctly then you could use MPIO within the guest to connect to a iSCSI disk outside of the VMware environment.

The honest truth is you may be better to present the disk to vSphere and then consume it within the guest from vSphere, i.e. present the iSCSI disk to ESX, format it as a VMFS datastore and create a VMDK for your Windows 2012 R2 VM on that. With properly configured MPIO within ESXi you would get the multipathing you desire Smiley Happy

Kind regards.

RiderFaiz
Contributor
Contributor
‎07-27-2016 01:38 PM

Hi TompsG,

Thank you very much for your response and info! Now I have data on the iSCSI already and almost the whole partition was assigned to a lun for the the guest in VM already. DO you think if I can still reconfigure it so the iSCSI will appear in the VMware host as well?

No matter what, thank you very much for your your answer!


Takami Chiro

0 Kudos
ThompsG
Virtuoso
Virtuoso
‎07-27-2016 09:54 PM

Hi Takami,

No worries with the information.

As you already have data on the LUN and it is formatted with NTFS then you cannot exactly present it to the VMware host so the VMware host can use it as a VMFS datastore.

What you can do is present the LUN to the VMware host and then connect the LUN to the VM as a Raw Device Mapped disk. This make it appear to the VM as a local disk however is accessed using iSCSI from the VMware host. This is probably considered best practice for what you are trying to do and given that the disk is already populated with data makes for the easiest migration path.

Here is a pretty good step by step guide to get you going: https://www.vmadmin.co.uk/resources/35-esxserver/58-rdmvm or the official word from the bird: VMware vSphere 5.1

Kind regards,

ThompsG

0 Kudos