Boot from SAN Problem

[ben lora]

Hello Everyone!!

I seem to be having a problem booting from SAN. Trying to configure a NetApp, Cisco UCS and VMware vPhere 5 setup.

So I have the UCS system booting from SAN via ISCSI on fabric A. It boots just fine but it does post an error as you can see on image1 attached. I would like to know what the error means and why its happening. But the real problem seems to be that I can't seem to boot from SAN via Fabric B. Meaning when I administratively bring down all uplink ports on fabric A the blade does not boot. I have two ISCSI NIC configured each pointing to a different storage VLAN and configured to only use by fabric.

My storage configuration is as follow:

Two ISCSI VLAN-----VLAN1 for ISCIS01 and VLAN2 for ISCSI02

One ISCSI VLAN per ISCIS VNIC

Both VLAN configured on the Netapp controller accepting ISCIS traffic

No fabric failover configured on the fabric interconnects

Now from what I can see the problem seems to be that the second ISCSI VNIC is picking up an IP address from VLAN1 instead of VLAN2 (image 2 and 3). I can't seem to figure out why its not picking up the correct VLAN IP address. Even though I configured two ISCSCI-initiator IP pools, one for each ISCSI VLAN (image 4).

By the way, I'm following the design guide listed below.

http://www.cisco.com/en/US/docs/unified_computing/ucs/UCS_CVDs/cisco_ucs_vmware_ethernet_flexpod.html

Thanks everyone for your help.

Image 1

Image2

Image 3

Image 4

[Robert Burns]

Ben,

The problem is the whitepaper is mis-leading.   When configuring IP Pools for iSCSI you can't designate one pool for Fabric A and one for fabric B.  They're all lumped into the same pool, even though your IP Blocks may reside in different subnets.

If you want to have separate subnets for iSCSI you will need to manually assign the IP address to your B-Fabric iSCSI initiator.

There are improvements coming in the next release 2.1 to address this.

Regards,

Robert

[ben lora]

Thank you so very much Robert for your input, much appreciated! I will try your work around and report back here.

Do you have any input on the error coming up on boot? This error shows up even when the system boots up without any problem from fabric A.

[Robert Burns]

Its a generic error detailing a problem with one of the paths (Fabric B in your case due to the invalid IP/VLAN).

You have two paths, one to each fabric.  As you know Fabric A is fine, but Fabric B's interface is throwing the error.  Once you correct the initiator IP pool as instructed above, it will vanish.

Robert