UCS iSCSI Boot LUN - Issues

[scottcuk1]

We are running the latest firmware in our UCS environment and are trying to setup iSCSI BFS LUNs. We have provisioned the boot LUNs to the blades.

The blades iSCSI vNIC is assigned natively to our iSCSI VLAN. The blade can connect to the LUN as as we can see its IP attached from the back-end storage when powered up.

Everything appears to be correct. 

However, after entering ESX setup over a remoely mounted VMware ISO, no storage is visible.  

From the interconnect console get config confirms connection on one of the blades. 

Can anyone advise what steps we can take to troubleshoot?

adapter 1/2/1 (mcp):1# iscsi_get_config

vnic iSCSI Configuration:
----------------------------
vnic_id: 13
          link_state: Up

       Initiator Cfg:
     initiator_state: ISCSI_INITIATOR_READY
initiator_error_code: ISCSI_BOOT_NIC_NO_ERROR
                vlan: 0
         dhcp status: false
                 IQN: iqn.2012-00.com.cisco:ESX_blade_04
             IP Addr: 192.168.0.10
         Subnet Mask: 255.255.255.0
             Gateway: 192.168.0.1

          Target Cfg:
          Target Idx: 0
               State: ISCSI_TARGET_READY
          Prev State: ISCSI_TARGET_DISABLED
        Target Error: ISCSI_TARGET_NO_ERROR
                 IQN: iqn.1992-08.com.netapp:sn.1575131906
             IP Addr: 192.168.50.130
                Port: 3260
            Boot Lun: 0
          Ping Stats: Success (12.009ms)

        Session Info:
          session_id: 0
         host_number: 0
          bus_number: 0
           target_id: 0

[padramas]

Hello,

Can you please share the UCSM version and ESXi version that you are trying install on the iSCSI LUN ?

Padma

[scottcuk1]

Hi

Thanks for responding; it's UCSM 2.0 (3c) and ESX 5.0.1. TAC actually called me just after I posted this who fixed it by changing the iSCSI adapter policy settings to the following. The issue was centered around the DHCP timeout value.

We now have a second issue with installing ESX  5. It gets to 90% then faults. "Expecting 2 bootbanks, found 0".

F12 brings up the following

I'm adding a second iSCSI vNIC now and then I'll move the order placement of them as I've read on another thread,

[scottcuk1]

Adding an extra iSCSI vNIC did not help but changing the placement order of both the iSCSI vNICs to last solved the issue.

[Dominic Foley]

I have just done 2x flexpods using latest UCSM code with NetApp storage and iscsi boot (with ESXi).  No problems whatsoever.  Yes indeed, your iscsi vnics, do have to be the last in the list.  You can modify the placement of the vnics after creation.

If all your native vlans, ip addressing, overlays etc are correct there shold not be a problem.