EQL ps-m4110 volume provisioning

Hello,

This is not difficult to do.  There are two methods:

1.)  Create the volume on EQL, set access to the same as the VMFS volumes.  Rescan the iSCSI adapter to connect to the volume.  Then at the VM level, use add disk and then select "Raw Device Mapping" option.  Then you'll get a list with the 1.3TB volume.  It will now show up as a raw drive in the VM.

2.)  Use the guest iSCSI adapter and directly connect to the 1.3TB volume you created. In that case you would set the access to the IQN of the server not the ESXi servers.  This comes in handy if the application can benefit from EQL HIT kit.  I.e. SharePoint, SQL, Exchange, fileserver.  Since you can create application consistent snapshots or replicas.  

Regards,

Don

On EQL Site its a standard job like

- Create a Volume

- Assign a proper ACL based on IQN, Chap or IP.

done.

Preparing ESXi vNetworking

- Create 2 Portgroups of type "VM Network" (not VMKernel!). Place them on a new or existing vSwitch but this depends on how many VMNICs are around. Best Practice would be to use 2 dedicated VMNICs just for ISCSI Guest traffic. But in most environments the same vSwitch/VMNIC is used as the ESXi used to iSCSI traffic. Each Portgroup have one primary VMNIC and the other as atandby. This is different compared to the ESXi iSCSI binding.

Preparing VM Guest

- Add to more vNICs to the VM and asign them to the  new created Portgroups

- Add IPs to the new two interfaces and try to to ping the iSCSI Group IP (WKA)

- Modify the ign to something you can remember like  iqn.YYYY-MM.com.example:hostname where YYYY-MM  is the Year/Month where the company is founded or project was startet

- Install latest EQL HIT together with MS MPIO features in the Guest OS

Your customer should think about backup especialy when Dell vRanger/VM is used. The direct attached iSCSI LUN is not part of the VM backup anymore.

Regards,

Joerg