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AIO 600 ISCSI & VMWare

 
Mark Brand
Advisor

AIO 600 ISCSI & VMWare

Has anyone successfully used ISCSI from VMWare Infrastructure 3 (or any version for that matter) to the AIO? Is this impossible to get it to communicate between the Microsoft ISCSI and the Linux ISCSI? If so, is there any whitepapers or steps in order to do this?
Thanks.
14 REPLIES 14
John McCarthy (Entry St
Occasional Advisor

Re: AIO 600 ISCSI & VMWare

The AiO product line is certified with ESX servers. A whitepaper is in the works, but there are resources available from VMware. You need to use the ESX s/w initiator (the qLogic hba is not yet certified) and will need to use the Microsoft iSCSI target mgmt console to configure the iSCSI LUN access from the AiO side.

Feel free to post questions.

Cheers,
John
Mark Brand
Advisor

Re: AIO 600 ISCSI & VMWare

Great, thanks for the response. I actually stumbled upon the solution and forgot to update this question. If anyone else runs up against this, I found this quick little tutorial that worked slick. Once I completed this, the ISCSI communication worked fine and I had all the space I needed on our All-in-One for our two Virtual Machines.
It can be found at:
http://www.vmguru.com/blogs/vmguru/archive/2006/10/12/925.aspx
John McCarthy (Entry St
Occasional Advisor

Re: AIO 600 ISCSI & VMWare

Glad you got it working! That's a good article - thanks for posting it.

-john
Miguel Gonzalez Casta├▒o
Occasional Advisor

Re: AIO 600 ISCSI & VMWare

I'm doing the same with Debian, open-iscsi and Virtual Server. The performance is very poor (30-40 Mb/s read/writes).

I have to try with a stand-alone server to see if the issue is the Virtual Server or the HP Storage AIO 600 but If anyone can give me some ideas, they will be very welcome.
John McCarthy (Entry St
Occasional Advisor

Re: AIO 600 ISCSI & VMWare

Hi Miguel,

Can you supply any information regarding the configuration of the AiO600 - type (SAS,SATA) of disks, RAID config (level, disks)?

Thanks,
John
Miguel Gonzalez Casta├▒o
Occasional Advisor

Re: AIO 600 ISCSI & VMWare

Hi,

The server AiO 600 only has SATA drives in RAID 5.

I have tested using smbmount the Samba shares in the AiO 600 and the performance is similar.

I have downloaded the trial license for enabling iSCSI devices in the Multifunction gigabit NIC and still I get the same performance (about 10 MB/s). I've downloaded the accelerator pack included in the trial (but I haven't installed anything yet).

Can I expect that after installing the accelerator pack the performance would be better? Is there any PDF explaining how to setup all this? I've found this link but the link is broken:
ftp://ftp.compaq.com/pub/products/storageworks/whitepapers/UsingMSiSCSITargetSoftware_4AA1-0720ENW.pdf
John McCarthy (Entry St
Occasional Advisor

Re: AIO 600 ISCSI & VMWare

Hi Miguel,

SATA based storage will definitely be slower performance compared to SAS...

Adding TOE or iSCSI acceleration to your initiator typically doesn't add much, and won't do anything at all for SATA drives where the drives are the bottleneck.

TOE and iSCSI acceleration are for initiators, not targets, so don't bother installing these on the AiO storage server.

Cheers,
John
klang65
New Member

Re: AIO 600 ISCSI & VMWare

The link on vmguru.com is broken for the basic "how to" setup the iSCSI storage on the AIO1200. Does anyone have a copy of the article they can send me?
THX
John McCarthy (Entry St
Occasional Advisor

Re: AIO 600 ISCSI & VMWare

Please see the URL below for a list of white papers for AiO. There's a config guide in their for AiO and ESX servers.

-john

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/storage/aiowhitepapers.html