ISCSI Help - direction or consulting needed

[kdbaumann]

I hope this is the right forum.

Here’s the issue. We have TrueNAS running just fine. You can ping the world and other servers on the network. All is well to this point. We have other approximately 10 other TrueNAS servers (misc SuperMicro hardware, nearly all Dual Xeon V2 CPU, mix of 32-64Gb RAM, etc). We have been doing this ever since like FreeNAS 7 or maybe a bit earlier.

However the following has us puzzled (and we are likely just missing something stupid). We have one of the servers connected to VMWare via iSCSI, and it’s happily running just fine and loving life. We repurposed and installed new latest version of TrueNAS 12.0-U7 on a new server (all are running this), we have set up iSCSI on it and then went to VMWare to add into the cluster. Nada, nothing, doesn’t show…. We have checked networking, software and physical, rebooted the server, rebuilt the iSCSI, etc…. Still it can not be seen by VMWare cluster, however you can ping from the TrueNAS server the VMWare cluster servers…. Networking is pretty simple, running 10Gb connections to a Cisco Nexus and then to Dell R630’s that are also connected to a PURE storage unit. Nothing fancy. It’s on it’s own network for moving data to and from.

At a loss here. Would appreciate any help. Willing to pay someone to VPN in and look at what we have setup and help fix…. Seriously.

Thanks. If this is the wrong place please point me to the correct spot. This appeared to be correct when I was looking through things.

 

[Joseph_LWBEU]

WOW, I'm shocked not a single response here.
I came to your post because I am just starting with TrueNAS for the same thing and I have a budget to pay for help.
iscsi targets for 3 hosts, Dell R640 with Boss card and 10 SSD drives as the truenas server.
May I ask if you are able to recommend a consulting person or firm?
Or what have you found to be the best source of help for this sort off setup.

 

[jgreco]

Most of the users on these forums are hobbyists, or are doing their own self-support for the company that they work for.

A few of us may be general consultants. I try not to sell against iXsystems, because I feel that'd be patently unfair to use their own forums to drum up business and take away potential customers from them. A few others are not consistently active here. The number of people you are reaching on these forums who are candidates for this sort of consulting engagement is very small. It has never been more than a handful of us.

Additionally, with respect to FreeNAS/TrueNAS, I typically provide for free on the forum the advice I might otherwise sell to clients. In order for that to happen, it's best to summarize your problem, as asked of all posters in the Forum Rules, including a hardware manifest, description of the problem, etc. This encourages more people to lay eyes on your issue. There are plenty of people who dabble with iSCSI and storage servers, but building production-grade servers is a bit complex. For VMware, some log capture on both the ESXi host and the filer may be helpful to catch what is actually going on. Some problems are going to be beyond what can really be debugged on the forum, of course, but it doesn't hurt to start off that way.

 

[Jessep]

Is this what you are seeing?

iSCSI Initiators (VMware 7.0) - Connected Initiators List Empty

Hi There, I apologize if this is a known issue or has been covered somewhere else. I just setup a POC of TrueNAS Core to run as an iSCSI datastore for our VMware ESXi 7.0 Hosts. When setting up the Initiator Groups I am able to add the Authorized Networks fine and it respects those... but...

www.truenas.com

 

[Joseph_LWBEU]

Should I avoid TrueNAS 12.0u7 and use the previous version? I will be using it as iscsi target for vsphere ESXI 7.02 on DELL R640s with the Dell ISO

 

[jgreco]

avoid TrueNAS 12.0u7 and use the previous version?

Probably. Also, since you're using a Dell server, make sure you are not using a PERC RAID controller.

See:

What's all the noise about HBAs, and why can't I use a RAID controller?

1) An HBA is a Host Bus Adapter. This is a controller that allows SAS and SATA devices to be attached to, and communicate directly with, a server. RAID controllers typically aggregate several disks into a Virtual Disk abstraction of some sort...

www.truenas.com