Datastore missing

[ISD_Plc]

Hi Guys

I have a small probelm I'm hoping someone can help with.

I have 3 hosts connected to a netapp san and two hosts connected to an ibm san the later are a dev enviroment.

Now normally I have an Iscsi datastore connected that hosts templates and iso's and I am having trouble getting it to be seen by the 3 hosts on the netapp even when it is succesfully connected to the others. This datastore resides on the netapp san.

The 3 servers connected to the netapp (direct fibre attached) can actually see the lun in the iscsi hba settings but when you look for the storage it doesnt show until you try to add storage and then it says it will destroy the filesystem whereas normally as you know it would just add the lun as an available filesystem (VMFS by the way)

ok enough rambling anyone have any suggestions?

[Texiwill]

Hello,

iSCSI usage requires that a service console port participate in the iSCSI network. So first check that. Also check to see if you can ping the iSCSI vmkernel device from your netapp. Generally these issues are related to networking.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky, author of the forthcoming 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', publishing January 2008, (c) 2008 Pearson Education. Available on Rough Cuts at http://safari.informit.com/9780132302074

[mstahl75 · Accepted solution]

then it says it will destroy the filesystem

I'm thinking that has to do with the LVM.EnableResignature setting under Configuration -> Advanced Settings -> LVM. Not 100% positive but I had a similar issue in the past and changing that to 1 allowed the ESX server to see the LUN correctly. I changed it back after though.

[Jae_Ellers]

Also check you lun ids on each vm. I think NetApp presents luns to all systems with the same ID, but it's something to remember. All systems sharing the same storage need to see the same lun ID on the same luns.

It's OK to have different targets with the same lun ids as the target ID is used to create the lun signature, but it's not OK to have the same lun presented to the different servers with different lun ids.

I think with NetApp they're all the same.

I think with HP they're assigned in the order presented

I believe with IBM you can assign them individually

[ISD_Plc]

Do you mean that I need a seperate service console for the iscsi vswitch? I have a service console on the vswitch with the vmkernel?

The vswitch for iscsi doesn't thou?

[ISD_Plc]

hmm ok well on the two servers that see the lun it is ID 1 (vmhba40:1:1) but on the other the lun shows as ID 3 (vmhba40:2:3)

now on the netapp the lun is mapped as ID 3?

so what gives here then?

[ISD_Plc]

Right well the LVM.EnableResignature setting fixed it.... well almost now the lun just needs renaming as it has added snap*****.vmdk to the name but that I can sort.

cheers for the assistance.