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May 31st, 2016 08:00
iSCSI LUN mapping recommendations
Hi all!
I am interested in what you guys consider to be the best configuration for mapping a large number of LUNs to multiple VMware ESX clusters?
Here is a bit of background, I currently have just over 50 ESXi5.5 hosts in around 5 clusters connected via 10Gb Ethernet to a Compellent SC8000 serving around 120 data stores.
all hosts connecting using the ESXi host software iSCSI initiator. The Compellent is a dual head system managed by Enterprise manager 2014R2.
Currently I have one server cluster configured in EM mapping all ESX hosts to all LUNs. This has recently been expanded to included an number of RDMs which isn't sitting well with me.
Has any got any recommendations on how I should be configuring mappings for data stores and RDMs on the compellent that maintains LUN number consistency? also if anyone knows of any best practice documentation I love to have a look at that too!
Thanks for any assistance!
mluethye
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June 2nd, 2016 21:00
We have a similar setup and similar amount of hosts / data stores. We too have broken our clusters into about 5 clusters in vmware but within EM we actually just have two clusters, one for UCS and one for Dell.
While this makes mapping new drives easier in EM, it actually makes management a little harder. I was just on the same version as you with EM (recently got new disks so needed to move to 6.6.5 which needed EM 2015 R3) and i recently started messing with the vCenter plugin for Compellent.
It's pretty awesome, only downside is any volume creation / removal requires EM clusters to match vCenter clusters. I bring this up because if you made the two environments match (too late for us at this point) your management point can be all in vmware and it's a pretty smooth process.
As for the RDM's i don't have a solution for you, we avoid them like the plague because of the management nightmare. I would do some real digging on trying to see how you can transition those to vmdk's. As for LUN mappings that's a great question, doesn't Compellent continually increase the LUN index each time? Could you use lower numbers that have maybe been used and discarded? If not could you use like a ridiculously high number?