Hello,

I am using the community-supported UnityVSA to test drive vVols.  I am currently using the UnityVSA to serve several iSCSI LUNs on two ESXi hosts, and it's been working great for traditional iSCSI LUNs.  However, when I try to use vVols, no Protocol Endpoints are showing up on my ESXi hosts and my vVol datastore on the VMware side is showing as read-only, with 0 bytes for the size.  I am trying to figure out what I am doing wrong.  Here are the steps I have taken:

1)  Verified NTP time sync is working correctly on vCenter, ESXi, and Unity VSA.  Verified Unity VSA iSCSI Target IP's listed in VMware iSCSI Software Initiator "Dynamic Discovery" tab.  iSCSI is working great, since I have (2) iSCSI LUNs already working great.  No network-level issues.

2)  Configured my iSCSI hosts in the Unity VSA to "Ignore" their non-iSCSI IP addresses and Fibre Channel interfaces.  The only interfaces being used by the Unity VSA are the iSCSI interfaces (2 IP's per ESXi host).

3)  Registered UnityVSA as VASA provider in vCenter via Manage >> Storage Providers (https://emc-unity.my.lab:8443/vasa/version.xml).  The Unity is showing Online, using VASA v2.0, with iSCSI as a supported block interface.  For "supported profiles," I see "VirtualVolumeProfile."  All looks good here.

4)  Created Block vVol Datastore in the UnityVSA, associated with capability profile, and granted host access to my 2 iSCSI ESXi hosts to the vVol Datastore.  All looks green, no errors.

5)  Verified the presence of (2) Protocol Endpoints on the UnityVSA, one for each ESXi host.  All look green.  (However, these PE's don't appear to be getting propagated to the ESXi hosts themselves.)

6)  Performed a "Rescan" of the ESXi hosts several times, to rescan the iSCSI software adapters.  Also performed a "Synchronize" and "Rescan" of the Unity VASA provider in vCenter.

7)  Looked at ESXi host >> Manage >> Storage >> Protocol Endpoints, and the list is empty.  The Unity iSCSI PE's do not show up on either host.  This doesn't look right.

8)  Attempted to create VVOL datastore in vSphere Client.  (Datacenter >> Storage >> New Datastore >> VVOL >> EMC Unity VASA Provider >> EMC vVol Datastore), and it was created as read-only with 0 bytes as the size.  Because it is read-only, I get this error:

"vSphere HA failed to create a configuration vVol for this datastore and so will not be able to protect virtual machines on the datastore until the problem is resolved."

I presume this error is because the iSCSI Protocol Endpoints are not getting propagated from the Unity to the ESXi host.  Any idea where to go next for troubleshooting?

Thanks,

Bill