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Isolated iSCSI network but not isolated management network

Hi All,

I have a question which I cannot find an answer to after many hour and days of Googling (maybe I'm just a crap Googler Smiley Wink).

To keep things simple I'll abstract away most of the nitty gritty details - it shouldn't make a difference.....so currently I have a vSphere 4u2 cluster which utilises iSCSI HP (LeftHand) P4500 nodes. The iSCSI network is physically separate from the management and VM networks.

Basically my question is, what happens to a VM when the ESX server that it's running on suddenly loses (for whatever reason, cable pull, etc) its connection to the SAN? That is, it no longer sees any path to the storage? How can I move/restart this VM on a different ESX host that hasn't lost it's connection to the SAN? Bear in mind that whilst the iSCSI network is isolated, the management network & VM networks are not which means HA won't kick in.

What I've found is that in this situation is that in vCenter, the VM's status remains "powered on" because for all intents and purposes it is, irrespective of the actual state of the OS in the VM. In addition, the actual OS remains in a frozen/suspended state - most likely the result of the VMX process running from memory. Now if I restore the iSCSI network to the SAN, the VM that was previously frozen/suspended magically comes to life as if nothing has happened! Even after 10+ minutes!

What happens if for some reason, I am unable to restore the iSCSI network and instead want to start up the VMs on a different ESX server?

Thing is I can't start the VM on a different server because it's still powered on. I can't unregister the Vm using vmware-cmd because it can't see the path to the vmx file on the LUN hosted by the storage! Attempting to VMotion the server off doesn't work either.

So I'm at wits end. Has anyone else come across this situation? Am I missing something obvious here?

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vmroyale
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Immortal

Hello.

Ideally, there would be redundancy throughout the design of the system, and the storage should not drop. With that being said, you should be able to use the info in kb 1004340 or kb 1014165 to get the VM powered off.

Good Luck!

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
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