StoreVirtual VSA Cluster Virtual IP not pingable and unable to present volumes to ESX hosts

[Thomas_SG]

Dear Community

I have a VSA installaiton spanning 3 ESX 5.5 hosts and a VSA appliance on each host.

I have created a new volume on this particular VSA cluster and trying to present it to my ESX hosts.

The VSA volume has an iSCSI name which, together with the VSA cluster Virtual IP address, is used to present the volume on my ESX hosts. This is done using a Static Discovery entry on my iSCSI Software Adapter.

My problem is that the volume is not visible on my ESX servers. I am quite sure I am doing this the right way.

I have rescan'ed my adapter and disks, but it is not visible.

I found out that the Virtual IP address of that particular VSA cluster is not pingable, which is rather strange. I have other VSA clusters where the IP address is pingable.

All the VSA appliances are pingable.

As a test, rather than using the VSA cluster virtual IP address in the static discovery entry, I used the IP address of one of the VSA appliances.

The disk appeared in ESX immediately.

I am quite sure there is something wrong with the VSA cluster or the virtual IP address of the cluster. Question is, how do I troubleshoot that and fix the issue?

Are there any log files I can examine?

Some help is greatly appreciated.

[Thomas_SG]

I can also mention that this entire ESX infrastructure is on a single VLAN; ESX hosts, guests, VSA appliances and the VSA cluster virtual IP are all on the same 24 bit subnet.

This VSA is running the free 1TB license from HP. My total disk space is less than 1TB, so I don't think that is the problem.

Has anyone experiences this issue before?

[Thomas_SG · Accepted solution]

OK, so I found the issue, maybe not the actual root cause, but at least it is working now.

Basically, when you look at the VSA cluster and the virtual IP settings, that virtual IP is “owned” by one of the VSA appliances.
In this particular case, it was owned by VSA03.
I could not find a way to manually move the ownership to another VSA node (stopping the manager on that particular node did not help), so I rebooted VSA03 and the ownership was automatically migrated to VSA02.
Immediately after the ownership was changed, the IP address became pingable and I am now able to present the disk to VMware.