Hello everyone,
I've spent three months now working with 2 ESX Servers (now running 3.01 and 3.0.2) managed by Virtual Center 2.0.2 with a Storevault S500 (using ISCSI) for storage. I have not had any catastrophic failures but every time I've changed store related configurations I've had to spend 4-5 hours to get the ESX servers to communicate with the Storevault. I've spoken to Storevault techs and VMware techs and they have both given me great advice regarding configuration changes, software upgrades, etc. Through this process I've upgraded the storevault to the latest firmware and client release and upgraded Virtual Center and one of the ESX servers to the highest patch levels. However after spending another 5 hours to connect a freshly reinstalled ESX server to the S500 I'm starting to question the worthiness of the device when used with VMware.
I have trouble every time I rebuild or introduce an ESX server to the storevault, where I can't seem to configure the ESX server to view and use the LUN on the storevault. The lun that I am currently using on the storevault is a "windows" type lun. I did this in error when I first created the LUN, but at the time I had no problems connecting the first ESX Server to the lun. The problems started when I got the 2nd ESX server running. Most of the time the storevault does not let me add the initiator of the new ESX server to the preexisting initiator group on the Storevault. The first time I fixed it involved the same non-logical steps that fixed it the last time. The tech and I recreated initiator groups, renamed initiator, and created test LUNs multiple times before we finally got it working. During that event we spent a frightening hour where we could not reconnect either ESX server to the LUN. The tech didn't know for sure what the cause was at the time, and today the tech did not know why we had problems either. The only remaining lead provided to me by a storevault tech was to back up the VMs onto another location, delete all the luns on the storevault, and then create a new lun, this time with a type of "vmware". Then I'll hopefully be able to gracefully and quickly connect this new LUN to the ESX Servers, and move the VMs back to the LUN..
I'll let everyone know what happens after I recreate the LUN with the vmware type, hopefully everything will work. The frustrating part is that once the ESX servers can see the storevault everything runs fine. If anyone has used the S500 please post your good (or bad) experiences!
Thanks!