Adding a LUN with an existing VMFS into an ESXi node

jason — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 02:53:53 +0000

I really only have 1 lun that is important to me on my home san. It stores a VM running ubuntu that I remote into using NoMachine on a fairly constant basis from all over the place. When I upgraded the SAN and did a zfs send and receive from one SAN to another, I neglected to think about the iscsi IDs getting changed between SANs thus screwing up my ESXi machine. I could reimport the LUNs easy enough, but when you import a LUN into an ESX node, the first thing it does is format it! Not good. So after digging around, I found a way to tell ESXi to simply scan the SAN for available LUNs and to allow access to VMFS that might be on them.
In your VI client, do the following.

Select the Configuration tab

Select Advanced Settings

Select LVM in the left pane

Set LVM.EnableResignature to 1 and hit OK

Go back to Configuration

Click Storage Adapters

Right click on your iscsi adapter and select rescan. This will take a minute or two.

In storage, you’ll now see a bunch of LUNs labeled snapshot-whatever_you_called_the_LUN

Rename the snapshots to just be whatever_you_called_the_LUN and go along your merry way

Crisis averted!

connecting a solaris 10 machine to an iscsi LUN

jason — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 19:23:44 +0000

It couldn’t get much easier then this. Assuming that your SAN is on 192.168.168.168 and that your lun doesn’t need CHAP authentication, give these commands a run.

iscsiadm add discovery-address 192.168.168.168:3260
iscsiadm list target
devfsadm -i iscsi

Now you can run format and access that disk,
enjoy!

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Adding a LUN with an existing VMFS into an ESXi node

connecting a solaris 10 machine to an iscsi LUN