Lost my LUN's in VMware

Hi,

OK the title isn't particularly correct. What we have is 'shifted targets' which is just as disastrous.

So we have a VMWare (ESX4 up01) server talking to Open-e SAN with 4 volumes. Say vol 1, 2, 3, 4 - iSCSI targets 1,2,3,4 as far as VMware is concerned. VMware uses Vol1/VMFS1 is Target 1, Vol2/VMFS2 is Target 2 etc etc ....simple.

I wanted to increase the size of Vol 4 so I deleted it - there is no data on it. However VMware now sees Vol1 OK, Vol2 / VMFS2 is now Target 8! (for some obscure reason), Vol3/VMFS3 is now Target2, and Vol4/VMFS4 (which I deleted) is now Target 3. Big mess.

In open-e I an still 'see' the volumes as I expect them to be after the deletion, but VMware definately can't.

Luckily we were using replaceable data on all but the Vol1 - which has remained intact.

Anybody seen anything like this before? I'm happy to accept I may have mis-configured or something - but this shouldn't be possible on an 'Enterprise' SAN should it?

Open-e support can't find anything wrong - but I'm very nervous about putting more critical data on it.

Any ideas where to start?

The only idea I have had (whilst writing this) is that I could not understand why Vol1 would be OK when the others had the problems, the only difference is that Vol1 is on a different Vol Group. Should all Vols be on a seperate Volume group?

Lots of questions.....thanks for any help.

I had a problem like this

I had the used a duplicate lun numbers on the Vmware side


check the link
http://communities.vmware.com/message/701181#701181

Why would you have the volumes in seperate iSCSI Targets?

The way I have it setup and the most typical way to do it would be:

On the DSS - Target0 -> Contains LUNs for all 4 volumes. LUN IDs should be 1,2,3,4 (NONE set to 0)

VMWare doesn't like when you mess with Targets, but LUNs are a little easier to mess with. Basically, if you wanted to increase the size of the volume for let's say... LUN 4, you would remove LUN 4 from that target, resize the Volume, then re-attach to the target as LUN 4 again and rescan on the ESX server.

Feel free to email me at: (drewmeyer at 1parkplace dot com) and I can exchange screenshots of my setup so you can see it firsthand.

Hi Thanks for the replies.

Symm - I checked again and certainly not duplicate LUN numbers. So I don't think that was the issue but thanks anyway.

1parkplace - thanks for the info - I didn't believe what I was doing WAS playing with the targets - but evidently it must have. Certainly OPen-E support didn't see anything wrong with the config otherwise I ma sure they would have told me. But I guess there are lots of ways of doing this. I'll send you that email to get a look at the config. Cheers