Freenas/VMWare iSCSI boot time

[Yamanipanuchi]

I'm not sure how exactly to search for this, I've tried but I come up with a lot of unrelated items.

Plus this probably falls more under the VMware side of config. But im reaching out to whoever might have faced this issue?

I have Freenas 9.3 and VMware 5.5 running, I have all my VM's in a datastore connect via iSCSI.

The problem I run into, Although its not to often is that when I have a power failure and my UPS runs out the systems obliviously go down. When they come up, Freenas doesn't have the iSCSI ready so none of VM's auto start.

 

[cyberjock]

The problem I run into, Although its not to often is that when I have a power failure and my UPS runs out the systems obliviously go down. When they come up, Freenas doesn't have the iSCSI ready so none of VM's auto start.

What is "they"?

The bottom line is that auto-starting is a function of ESXi. If FreeNAS isn't already running the ctl service (iSCSI service), then ESXi won't mount the iSCSI target, and you'll clearly get no autostarting of VMs.

So it sounds like your timing is off. You need to bootup the FreeNAS machine, then the ESXi machine after the FreeNAS machine is totally booted up.

There are ways to force this behavior by default in ESXi, but that is way beyond the scope of this forum.

 

[toadman]

Agree. It's pretty easy to set delays for startup. (Though pre 5.5 I think this was broken, at least for NFS. And people were setting up dummy VMs on local datastores to get the right startup delay.)

I also think there are ways to have the system wait for the iscsi to be up, like altering ScratchConfig.ConfiguredScratchLocation to point to the datastore. (I haven't tried this.)