Hello!
A heads-up to an issue that cost me some time today. In the past, iSCSI CHAP passwords had to be between 12 and 16 characters when connecting to an Iomega NAS. In particular, the Iomega whitepaper that describes how to connect VMware ESX or ESXi to an Iomega ix4-200r ( http://download.iomega.com/com/nas/pdfs/vmware_200r_wp.pdf ), page 20 states that passwords must be 12 to 16 characters long. Passwords shorer are padded with trailing asterisks, longer passwords are truncated. I have an ix4-200d, but it uses the same firmware as the 200r. (I believe that the firmware on the ix2 devices is either identical or very similar, and may benefit from this as well.)
The iSCSI CHAP password I am using is longer than 16 characters, so I had truncated it. However, today I updated firmware to the latest (2.1.38.22294). However, my ESXi 4.1 boxes were unable to connect to the NAS via iSCSI: the iSCSI datastore did not show up. The NFS datastore from the same NAS did, but not the iSCSI.
After some struggle, I ended up trying the full-length password. Success: my iSCSI datastore magically appeared. So, it seems that you no longer need to truncate longer passwords on the Iomega NAS.
I did not try to change the passwords to something shorter, but if someone else runs into this with a shorter password, please reply so that others will know as well.
Timothy J. Massey
Out of the Box Solutions, Inc.
http://www.OutOfTheBoxSolutions.com