Dell VxRail™ Appliance 4.7x Administration Guide

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Mount a new VMFS datastore over iSCSI

To make full use of the new iSCSI storage, create a new datastore. This datastore can be mounted to all the hosts in the cluster.

Steps

  1. In the vCenter Client select the cluster name.
  2. Click Related Objects > Datastores, then click the Add New Datastore icon to create a new datastore over iSCSI.
    The New Datastore window is displayed.
  3. In the Type window, select VMFS.
  4. In the Name and device selection window specify the name for the datastore:
    1. Choose one of the ESXi hosts for Select a host to view its accessible disks/Luns.
    2. Select the available iSCSI volume in the lower table.
  5. In the Partition configuration window, adjust the iSCSI datastore Size.
    It is recommended to set Size to Use all available partitions.
  6. In the Ready to complete window, review your entries and then click Finish to complete the datastore creation.
    The datastore over iSCSI is listed. Its status is “Unknown”.
  7. Click the Refresh icon.
    The datastore status changes to “Normal”.
  8. In the Storage tab, check the connection status between the iSCSI datastore and the hosts.

Results

After the VMFS over iSCSI datastore is created, you can:
  • Provision VMs to the VMFS datastore using the vSphere Client
  • Perform standard operations such as Open Console, Power On, Shutdown VM, Suspend VM, and clone VM
  • Migrate VMs between VxRail datastores and iSCSI datastores
  • Protect iSCSI external storage access with redundant path

In maintenance mode, VMs move to another node on the same iSCSI datastore automatically. The rebooted node is connected to the iSCSI datastore automatically. The iSCSI volume is kept as Remote Disk.

The benefit from the iSCSI multipath configuration is that if the physical adapter vmnic0 is down, iSCSI IO switches to another vmnic without interruption. When vmnic0 is back online, iSCSI IO will switch back to vmnic0 without IO interruption.

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