We have been using a couple of cheaper iSCSI SANs for a while now as a low-tier compliment to our FC SAN. This has been running well up until recently. As we needed more storage at a higher tier, and also because our FC SAN will be end of life at the end of this year we decided to install an Equalogic PS4110x with its own switching hardware. This converges at an HP c7000 blade environment. The Equalogic SAN is on a new VLAN and as such has two new vmk ports that are bound to specific physical nics to get multipathing. The old iSCSI SAN storage has a single vmk port on a different VLAN. Neither of the iSCSI VLANs have any routing.
A few days ago I decided to present a new target from our old iSCSI SAN and while dynamic discovery correctly identified the new target, no LUNs were detected after a rescan. This target works correctly on hosts that have not been configured with the new Equalogic networking.
Rather oddly, targets that existed before the Equalogic networking was setup still present LUNs without issues, and I can vmkping all of the SANs. The Equalogic is working without issues.
Without routing, I would of thought that these two iSCSI VLANs could co-exist regardless of port binding on one of them, I guess I was wrong. Having said that I am not sure exactly when the problem started as it only occurs when you configure a new target, so it is just a hunch at this stage that the port binding is the problem.
Although the topology is slightly different to my scenario,
kb 2038869 article states that when using port binding "All VMkernel ports must reside on the same broadcast domain" which clearly is not the case in my environment. However, existing targets work normally, vmkping is successful, and I am using two completely different SANs on different networks, I am not attempting to reach the same SAN over two different broadcast domains.
Additional - I have a vSphere 5.1 environment with 3 x ESX 4.1 hosts and 1 x ESXi 5.1 host.
Any ideas?
