I have the above working but a couple of questions have arisen.

1. The SAS card that I am using in the head units will only work 100% right if I use the 'experimental' kernel during boot time. I have modified it so they both boot from that kernel everytime. If it boots from the regular, 4 'units' show up that are all the same size (4TB) but there is only 1 - 4TB unit. When in experimental only 1 unit shows up. The SAS card isn't on your HBA so I guess I just need to know when the 'experimental' kernel will the be the 'main' kernel.

2. When provisioning iSCSI LUNs for use with the ESX host servers I have to make sure that none of the LUN numbers overlap at all or ESX seems to think that it's a redundant connection to the same LUN. For instance I setup a 15 GB partition and a 40GB partition. Then create two targets iqn.2007-08:mcc-storage.target0 and iqn.2007-08:mcc-storage.target1. Following this I assign the 15 GB partition to target0 as LUN 0 and the 40GB partition to target1 as LUN 0. I expect then for VMWare to recognize two targets one 15 and one 40GB.

What happens though is VMWare sees two 15GB partitions and it seems to think that those partitions are two paths to the same LUN.

Anyone else experience this same thing and is there a VMWare setting that disables the multi-pathing?

Also (and this is minor) VMWare does not pickup on the 'Alias' when it scans the LUN's. All of my LUN's show a blank Alias and it'd be nice to know which one is which.

3. Occasionally on the console of the VMWare host servers I'll get disconnect warnings saying that the connection to the a certian LUN is gone (ie scsi0:0:0:0). Anyone else see this?

4. Another thing (this probably belongs in feature requests) is that it'd be nice to have some comment fields when creating volumes. I create a volume for each VM that I'm going to be deploying so that I can use snapshots for some and not for others (thus saving on the snapshot load). But when I'm looking at the list of 25-30 volumes I have a hard time remembering which volume goes with which server and which volume is assigned to which iSCSI target.

So there you go. I'm sure there's more; let's start with that.

Thanks,
Ryan
Michigan Catholic Conference