C220 M4 iSCSI boot from SAN redundancy

[vladontus]

I've got C220 M4 server with two 1Gb Intel LOM adapters which I configured for iSCSI boot. I got boot from SAN working but only on one adapter at the time, secondary adapter is not active and stays that way even if I shut down the primary adapter. Is there a way to control iSCSI failover on the hardware level or this is has to be controlled by VMWare after the boot is complete?

Thanks!

[Manuel Velasco]

Hi Vladontus,

If you were to disable one nic at a time during boot up, are you able to boot from san with each nic?

For C-series standalone there is not an option that would allow the nics to failover at the hardware level. In this case you want to configure failover at the OS level.

[vladontus]

Manuel,

If during the boot process primary NIC down it will activate the secondary NIC and will complete the boot. But if primary NIC is active the secondary one will never gets activated. This is where I'm confused. On the storage side only one initiator gets logged in and storage complains about no redundancy. 

[Manuel Velasco]

What do you mean by "primary NIC down"?

How do you validate the configuration of both initiators in your server (both iscsi initiators nics)?

Is your storage array at any point able to talk to both initiators IP address?

You can test network connectivity to these nics by rebooting the server and force to go into the bios (press f2), once it is on the bios see if you can ping the IP address of these initiators from the storage array or a device on the same network.

[Walter Dey]

How did you configure the nic property in the CIMC configuration utility ?

shared LOM ?

NIC redundancy active-active or active-standby

[abaghel01]

Hi,

I am new to UCS and iscsi boot. I have done Boot from san in the past but all with FC. I am struggling to find the options to configure my ISCSI boot parameters, could you help me with the some steps how you configure the ISCSI boot on the UCS C220 M4.

I have an additional Intel I350 adpater which I am planning to use for ISCSI boot and have a VNXe storage as a boot lun.

thanks

[Walter Dey]

I don't think that we support iSCSI boot with the Intel adaptor

see eg. p 501 (I know this is for UCSM managed rack mount servers)

http://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/sw/gui/config/guide/2-2/b_UCSM_GUI_Configuration_Guide_2_2.pdf