Sunday, September 9, 2012

Equallogic SAN + VMWare ESXi 5.0 == annoying at times

I know a lot of you will laugh at me for this, but I'm hoping at least a few people find this useful. If you've got monitoring setup correctly on your EQL boxes (and you are running at least 5.0.5 firmware), you might be getting emails like this:
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ERROR event from storage array DABIGDISK
subsystem: MgmtExec
    event: 7.4.3
     time: Sat Sep  8 23:37:04 2012

iSCSI login to target 'xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:3260, iqn.2001-05.com.equallogic:0-8a0906-19f16ee02-6040000003b487d0-vss-control' from initiator 'xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:58885, iqn.1998-01.com.vmware:FEEKYFEEKY-07e33139' failed for the following reason:
                Initiator tried to bypass the security phase but we cannot.

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yup, sorry vmware, no biscuit.
It's an error, and it's kind of a stupid one, but it's not vmware's fault, it's actually a slight flaw (or duh, actually) on the equallogic side. There's two settings that need to be correctly configured, one of which is under Group Discovery -> iSCSI (refer to pic)



As you can see, it's a pretty simple check box. The other location is under VDS/VSS, in which case you simply don't give your vmware boxes permissions to use VDS/VSS unless you've already got the means in place to support it. 

Simple, stupid fix- and I was stupid enough to not even notice it until I actually ran into the headache tonight.