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Friday, November 11, 2011

iSCSI Boot with VMware ESXi on Cisco UCS

This is a follow up post to the iSCSI Boot From SAN post that shows how the virtual networking and Storage Adapter configuration of ESXi looks post install.


Note:  At the time that I posted this, only ESXi 4 is supported by Cisco for iSCSI Boot From SAN on Cisco UCS but ESXi 5 is what I had on hand to test the iSCSI Boot From SAN configuration.


  Once the networking configuration for the host has been completed, connect to the host with the vSphere Client.  The first iSCSI enabled vNIC for the Service Profile is automatically added to a vSwitch and a vmkernel port is configured with the IP address that was configured in the Boot Parameters for the 1st iSCSI vNIC in the server’s Service Profile referenced from my post here.





  In the above screen shot, even though the iSCSI vNIC is configured to behave as a physical iSCSI HBA in the UCS Service Profile, in vSphere I noticed that it is still installed as a software iSCSI adapter, and the vNIC is associated with the software iSCSI adapter for the ESXi host.  The iScsiBootPG Port Group was automatically created on the iScsiBootvSwitch vSwitch.





To add additional LUNs to the host for datastores, I configured the Volumes and LUN Mappings via the Lefthand CMC and then configured the Dynamic Discover settings in the Storage Adpaters section of the ESXi host.









3 comments:

MitchyB said...

Did you ever figure out if there was a way to make the UCS hardware initiator appear within ESXi as an independent storage adapter?

I am faced with a situation where I need to assign a different iQN to the software initiator but cannot because the UCS has hijacked it with the iSCSI boot parameters I configured in the service profile.

Harold Simon said...

MitchyB,

Unfortunately I haven't seen a work around for that yet.

Harold

William Robinson said...

MichyB, Did you ever find this? Since they have an HBA for FCoE I would hope that they have it for iSCSI.
Thanks,