ESX, VSA, CMC and HP Procurve setup

[SLAING]

Hi all,

I recently purchased an HP Virtualization bundle and am trying to get it up and running and not having much luck. your help with the config below is GREATLY appreciated! :)

FYI - i'm new to this, so please be gentle...

I have two ESX hosts with six nics each. I've installed ESX and configured the vswitches etc. (see attached pic - not 100% on this config).

I've configured the included HP Procurve 2510G switch for four VLANs as follows:

Default_VLAN: ports 9-12 and 24 (untagged)
VLAN-200 (iSCSI-VSA): ports 1 - 4 (tagged)
VLAN-201 (VMotion): ports 5 - 8 (untagged)
VLAN-666: all unused ports 13 - 23 (untagged)

The HP Procurve switch port#24 connects directly to my production LAN Cisco switch. (That is probably not the best way to do this - if at all - but again not sure how to best set this up).

I've got the CMC installed on my laptop which is on the production LAN. I am trying to add the VSAs to the CMC but it cannot find them. I know i've missed something here but not sure where, can you please shed some light?

thanks,

[SLAING]

I forgot to also add:

NICs 3 and 5 on each ESX host run to ports 9 - 12 on HP switch.

NICs 1 and 4 on each ESX host run to ports 1 - 4 on HP Switch.

NICs 0 and 2 on each ESX host run to ports 5 - 8 on HP switch.

thanks.

[teledata · Accepted solution]

You will need to configure routing between the VLANs, or create some rules on your gateway (firewall) to route your LAN to your iSCSI LAN for management traffic.

Alternatively you could assign your LAPTOP an IP address on the iSCSI LAN, and plug it into the iSCSI VLAN on the switch

Also - to take advantage of storage multipathing on vSphere 4 you will need 2 VMkernel ports, each bound to (only 1) separate physical NICs.

[Bryan McMullan]

Teledata has it right. Highly suggest you also configure flow control on the iSCSI san ports of the swtich.

[SLAING]

Hmmm....okay thanks. FYI - I connected a laptop directly into a switch port that is part of VLAN2 and assigned the laptop a static IP of 192.168.200.50/24.
From the ESX console I can ping that laptop and I can also vmkping it. aslo from the ESX console i can ping any host on the 192.168.49.X LAN. However when I ping the VSA1 VM that is sitting in VLAN2 at IP: 192.168.200.10 - I get no reply. If I vmkping it I get destination unreachable....so not sure what's going on there.

Anyway, in regard to adding the route on the firewall, when I add the route, I was going to use a Destination of: 192.168.200.0 and
Net Mask of: 255.255.255.0 but not sure what Default Gateway IP I should use ????? - what address should I assign here? I have 192.168.49.252 free that I can assign if need be but where do I place it?

thanks for being patient with this newb.

[SLAING]

Hi all,

I've got everything setup and working (sort of), however, when I try to upload some data to the VSAN, for example an ISO file - I get an I/O error after a minute or so. I am wondering if this is becaue I have STP & flow control running on the VLAN switch ports that are used for iSCSI?? Any ideas?

thanks,

[teledata]

Is the problem when using the vSphere client and uploading to a VMFS datastore?

If so I've had similar problems using the VI/vSphere client for file transfers. Much better (faster and more reliable) to use an SCP client like WinSCP or Veeam FastSCP to move files to/from datastores.