• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

VM Accessing RAID Drives

Z

Zerosum

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 9, 2010
Messages
216
Hello,

This is my first real attempt at setting up VMWare's ESXi 4.0. I have a decent understanding of VMs in general but I'm failing to understand the process of setting up another storage drive for a VM.

There's alot of knowledgeable people on here and hoping someone can help me with setting this up.

I'm tring to install Openfiler as a VM so it can act as an iSCSI target for other pc's on the network. I have ESXi 4 bare metal installed and working correctly. Openfiler is also installed as a guest VM on that machine. There's a 3ware 9650SE card inside with drives already attached. I have applied oem.tgz to ESXi and that is working well. On the card, I have created a 3.5TB drive array of which auto carving allowed the creation of 2 LUNs (1.99TB and 1.5TB respectively).

The end goal is to allow this VM to become an iSCSI target(host) for other machines on the physical network. The only requirements are, the iSCSI target needs to be larger then 2TB (3.5TB is fine for our needs) and it should be in it's own VM (since eventually we're going to put on a few very light test VMs on this PC)

Where I'm lost is how do I get the Openfiler VM to 'see' this 3.5TB drive so I can go about creating a new volume in Openfiler.

I've added a few screenshots to hopefully better explain.

ESXi Networking:
2mozhb9.png

ESXi Storage:
5nqdle.png

ESXi iSCSI Software Adapter:
2j6362x.png

ESXi 3ware 9560 Adapter:
2aevxmo.png


I would really appreciate if someone would be able to help me configure this. It doesn't look so hard but I think I'm missing a critical step or setting somewhere. If you have suggestions, that would be fine as well. Or if I need to present more info.

Thanks.
 
You are looking at things from too high a level. What you need to do is go to the configuration settings of the OpenFiler VM itself, and create new virtual hard disks associated with it on the VMWare storage groups with the space you want to add.

Once that is done, configure the new disks in OpenFiler and publish them as iSCSI targets.
 
Yeah, I'm sorry. That's what I'm tring to do.

I know I have to create a virtual disk in Openfiler's VM. What I can't figure out is how I am able to with these disks. I must have something else incorrectly set. There are 2 devices LUN0 and LUN1 on my 3ware card. Both of which are under 2TB minus a block.

Shouldn't these 2 appear under 'iSCSI Software Adapter'? So I am able to actually add them to Openfiler's VM. Right now, Openfiler, Hardware, Add..., Hard Disk, Create a new virtual disk, I don't get the ability to add this drive to the list. I'm pretty sure I'm missing a step before this.

Adding another virtual disk only allows me to add from the original drive (vmhba0 I believe).

I want to add vmhba2:L0 and vmhba2:L1 which is listed under 3ware's section of storage adapters which should probably be listed under iSCSI storage adapter instead.

I'm hoping this makes more sense. It's very possible that I just got this stuff incorrectly setup.
 
No. You need to create a VMDK on the datastores ISCSI00 and ISCSI01.

Edit the VM, add a hard disk, select one of your datastores. create the disk there. Openfiler will then see the disks.

Depending on the size of the VMDKs you create openfiler will then have a block device that corresponds to the vmdk you created. From there you can create volume groups and ultimately iSCSI volumes that you present through the openfiler VM.

Another thing that it could be, is the volume on the 3ware card 3.5TB with it presenting 2 volumes? Disable auto-carving and create 2 volumes < 2TB.
 
Last edited:
I think I found out where my error was. The original VMDK that it was installed on another datastore is a much smaller physical size. The vmfs block size was small which ment the allocation units only allowed up to 250GB. Which was fine for the OS VM datastore/vmdk as it's only given 8GB. But this was the reason why adding other disks gave that limit.

I changed the original datastore block size and giving it a go now. And it seems to be working now. It's building the 2 separate VMDK now both of which are under 2TB.
 
Thanks you guys.

The original datastore for the guest os was created on another drive. That drive was set for only 250GB max size so when I tried to add the other (2tb drives) to that VM, it was not working. As soon as I changed that, everything worked fine.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top