VMware Cloud Community
jayenjee
Contributor
Contributor
‎02-07-2013 06:47 PM

ESXi 5.1 host with no local storage - how to install Dell Multipathing Extension Module (MEM) v1.1.2?

We are looking at upgrading our production ESXi 4.1 hosts with a clean install of ESXi 5.1.  These hosts have no local storage.  Whilst testing an installation in our lab on a host that does have local storage, I noticed that the MEM bundle is copied to the local datastore as part of the installation process using vCLI (setup.pl).  I imagine the installation of MEM will fail on our production hosts due to no datastores available.  Will this be the case and if so is there any way to get around this?  I am unable to test as all of our lab servers have local storage.

Thanks

Reply
0 Kudos
3 Replies
vmroyale
Immortal
Immortal
‎02-07-2013 07:05 PM

Hello and welcome to the communities.

You can specify the full path to the vmfs volume and mem.zip file, and use SAN storage - assuming that SAN storage is available in production.

Brian Atkinson | vExpert | VMTN Moderator | Author of "VCP5-DCV VMware Certified Professional-Data Center Virtualization on vSphere 5.5 Study Guide: VCP-550" | @vmroyale | http://vmroyale.com
Reply
0 Kudos
jayenjee
Contributor
Contributor
‎02-07-2013 09:02 PM

Thanks for your welcome and reply.  I do have SAN storage available in production, however since I am performing a clean installation of ESXi 5.1 I am going to lose connectivity to the SAN as host settings will be wiped.  To re-establish connectivity I need to install MEM, but since I don't have local storage I can't install MEM (chicken before egg scenario).  In my lab I tried to manually create the (iSCSI) vSwitch, iSCSI Software Adapter, grant access to a volume and rescan but can't see the volume.  This didn't seem to be an issue when installing MEM 1.0.1 on ESXi 4.1 as the installer did not need copy the zip to a datastore.  Any other suggestions would be much appreciated.

Reply
0 Kudos
jayenjee
Contributor
Contributor
‎02-10-2013 05:19 PM

I have a fairly simple workaround for anyone who comes across this problem in the future.  I installed NFS services on a Windows Server 2008 R2 machine and configured a folder for NFS sharing (I had to allow read-write and "root" access for my host).  I then added the NFS share as a datastore to the host and the MEM installation used this location to copy the zip before installing.

Reply
0 Kudos