BL685c G6, Virtual Connect Flex-10, and iSCSI-vShpere 4.x

[chuckk281]

Scott was looking for customer info and guidance with iSCSI setup in VMware:

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Customer is asking for any basic guidance/cookbook/how-to set up vsphere 4 on a BL685c G6 to access P4000 thru Broadcom LOMs… First pair of LOMs would be for production/vmotion/mgmt and the second pair would be for dedicated iscsi storage.  BL685c booting from local storage.  Any high-level / basic steps that they could follow documented anywhere?   

Primarily asking for the steps necessary to set up the Flex-NICs to act as iscsi storage adapters.

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Vincent provided some guidance:

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With Broadcom LOMs and VC Flex-10 modules, you have nothing special to do with FlexNICs for iSCSI. They will be used and seen as regular NICs from ESX and you will use ESX software iSCSI initiator. VMware has an iSCSI SAN Configuration Guide you can use.

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Are you using iSCSI with VMware? Let us know how it is doing and and "gotchas" in setting it up. I do know that ESX 4.1 has some new iSCSI Boot capabilities and this will provide additional features and setup parameters.

[chuckk281]

Nick was good enough to provide additional info:

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There is also a LeftHand and VMware best practices document on setting up active/active iSCSI once you’ve got the VMware box connected. It doesn’t talk about FlexNICs, but as Vincent says, these will be seen as regular NICs by ESX.

“Running VMware vSphere 4 on HP LeftHand P4000 SAN Solutions” available here (if the link works!)

http://h21007.www2.hp.com/portal/site/dspp/menuitem.863c3e4cbcdc3f3515b49c108973a801?ciid=e87f9708310e4210VgnVCM100000a360ea10RCRD

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