- #How to setup iscsi vmware esxi 6.7 software
- #How to setup iscsi vmware esxi 6.7 plus
- #How to setup iscsi vmware esxi 6.7 free
First let’s enter the host information into the FlashArray. This includes creating the host information on it and also the iSCSI target ports.
#How to setup iscsi vmware esxi 6.7 software
Select it and the configuration will appear below.īefore we can configure the software iSCSI adapter we must configure the FlashArray itself. You will see the adapter now listed in the storage adapters list now.
There is no wizard at this point–just a message confirming the creation of the adapter.
#How to setup iscsi vmware esxi 6.7 plus
Go to Storage and then Storage Adapters pane in the Web Client and click the green plus and choose “Software iSCSI adapter.” If this is grayed out it means one has already been created–you can only have one per ESXi host. The next step is to create the software iSCSI adapter. Remember make sure no adapters are configured as standby. This will override the teaming policy of the vSwitch itself. You will need to select the “Override” option to do this. Repeat this process for the other VMkernel adapters so each uses a different one as their active adapter. To do this, select one of the VMkernel ports by clicking on the name in the vSwitch chart which will highlight in blue (“iSCSI 2” in the case of this image) and then click the pencil/edit icon up and to the left of it.Ĭlick on the “Teaming and failover” selection and choose one of the vmnics to be the active adapter and push all others down to unused. Each one should have a different active NIC for resiliency. The vSwitch we created has two active NICs so we need to override this behavior for each VMkernel adapter. Software iSCSI adapters require that any VMkernel adapter that it uses must only have one active physical NIC and no standby NICs. The switch will look like so after creating the second VMkernel port: Repeat the process to add the second VMkernel adapter to the switch we just created (vSwitch1). Each adapter will leverage one of the two physical NICs which we will configure in a second. Give the VMkernel port a name and the rest of the default are fine then assign it an IP address and a subnet mask.įinish the wizard and click the “Add Host Networking” again to add the second VMkernel adapter. In the next step, add both (or more) physical NICs to the active adapters list. So create and the “add host networking” button and choose “VMkernel Network Adapter” then a new switch. In order to connect an iSCSI adapter to a physical adapter you have to create a standard VMkernel port first. I am going to use one standard switch for this walkthrough. You can use a distributed switch or a standard switch, either is, of course, fine. For resiliency, you definitely want more than one.
#How to setup iscsi vmware esxi 6.7 free
In my environment I have two free 10 Gb/s physical adapters to use.
The next step is to create the required vSphere networking for the software iSCSI initiator (that we will create shortly) to access the physical network. This only needs to be done once in lifetime of a given ESXi host: esxcli storage nmp satp rule add -s "VMW_SATP_ALUA" -V "PURE" -M "FlashArray" -P "VMW_PSP_RR" -O "iops=1" I will just SSH into the ESXi box and run the command. This can be achieved in multiple ways (PowerCLI, SSH etc). I will show the end-to-end process for one ESXi host, so for other hosts just lather, rinse and repeat.Ī very important step–and this is for any ESXi host using storage (regardless of protocol) on the FlashArray: Create a SATP rule so that all Pure Storage FlashArray volumes are configured to use Round Robin multipathing and an IO Operations Limit of 1. I will be using ESXi 5.5 U2 with a FlashArray 420 running Purity 4.0.16. IP addresses are available for the iSCSI targets on the FlashArray and at least one (preferably two or more) addresses are free for each ESXi host that needs to be configured.UPDATE: Another post on iSCSI CHAP authentication can be found here.ģ) Configure Physical NIC and VMkernel Adapter Relationships Some of the images are a bit old, but the underlying concepts have not changed. Http :// They are not long and provide very good insight into the how/what/why of iSCSI on VMware. I’ve helped quite a few set this up in VMware environments so I thought I would put a post together on configuring ESXi software iSCSI with the Pure Storage FlashArray (I have yet to see a hardware iSCSI setup).īefore I begin, I highly recommend reading the following two documents from VMware: This is increasingly common in greenfield environments where they don’t want to invest in a Fibre Channel infrastructure.
I’ve been with Pure Storage for about ten months (time flies!) and a noticeable trend I’ve seen in the past six or so months is in the number of customers who are deciding to use iSCSI as their storage protocol of choice.