Hello,
I'm learning about VSphere ESX4 and iSCSI and a simple way to evaluate it is to use FreeNAS along with the ESX4 60 day trial. We will be getting a full blown EMC SAN and VSphere solution installed within a few months, but I'd like to have a little bit of playtime first hand.
So I have FreeNAS installed in VMWare Workstation along with 4 SCSI 72gb disks. These disks are in RAID5 and iSCSI is enabled. I can connect to the iSCSI using the Microsoft iSCSI initiator. I can format the disk and store files on it. It even worked with ESXi 3.5, but I since then wiped it to try the latest version of VMWare VSphere4.
For the life of me, I cannot add this iscsi datastore. In vSphere client under Configuration > Storage Adapters, I have the vmhba33 iSCSI connection to the FreeNAS box NetBSD iSCSI Disk (iqn.1994_04.org.netbsd.iscsi_target,L,0x4a71bbb1667c11de), runtime name: vmhba33:C1:T0:L0, 216GB capacity.
Now under Configuration > Storage, I attempt to create the datastore. Add Storage > Disk/LUN > Choose my only iSCSI option shown, name it vmds1, 256GB, Block size: 1MB, Maximize capacity, next, finish. Within a few minutes I will always get an error "Error during the configuration of the host: Unable to create Filesystem, please see VMkernal log for more details". Under FreeNAS I tried formatting it as FAT32, EXT2, NTFS, or leaving it unformatted. None work.
I remember having a heck of a lot of difficulty getting this to work with ESXi 3.5, but I did end up getting things going, along with 2 virtual machines up and running. Although I blew it all away to try vSphere 4. Now I don't remember what I did, or maybe this version doesn't want to play nice with FreeNAS iSCSI implementation.
Under the Events tab I see a lot of "Lost connectivity to storage device iqn.1994_04.org.netbsd.iscsi_target,L,0x4a71bbb1667c11de. Path vmhba22:C1:T0:L0 is down. Affected datastores: "VMDS1". Recovery attempt is in progress and outcome will be reported shortly."
There is one entry that says "Successfully restored access to volume 4a4bc1e1-f4bb4a45-cc91-000c2910ccd5 (VMDS1) following connectivity issues"
Although this is followed by much more of the above "Lost connectivity" messages.
I'm at wits end. I really want to play with this using iSCSI to simulate our future iSCSI SAN from EMC. Any help is greatly appreciated!