iSCSI with VMware SAN conectivity issues

[Deland01]

Im having a few issues with me VMware environment. I just set a test lab up with the following specs:

VMware Workstation 9 on my PC. Im running everything off a 500GB Samsung EVO SSD with 16GB fast DDR3 RAM, Intel i7 8 core CPU 3.4Ghz

I have the following VM's set up all joined to the domain talking together happily

DC01 - Domain Controller - Server 2008 R2 (1GB RAM)
VM-FILER01 - iSCSI SAN - FreeNas v9 (1GB RAM) (x2 iSCSI Data stores)
VM-FILER02 - iSCSI SAN - FreeNas v9 (1GB RAM) (x2 iSCSI Data stores)
VM-ESXI01 - ESXI Host - ESXI 5.5 (4GB RAM)
VM-ESXI02 - ESXI Host - ESXI 5.5 (4GB RAM)
VM-VCENTER03 - vCenter - Server 2012 (4GB RAM)

All the VM's are on the VMnet8 virtual network group which is NAT

The issue I have is when I try to create a VM on either host host on any of the 4 datastores half way through the setup the host disconnects from the viClient & locks up. 2 minutes minute later the host then comes back online. Im also unable to storage vMotion from any of the datastores.

As a test I crated a VM from locally attached storage on one of my VM hosts & this worked with no issues so the issue is looking like FreeNAS.

I tried uploading an ISO to the datastore & this failed half way through.

I see the following errors. Can anyone point me in the right direction to get this fixed?

Ive done some googling but the error codes aren't giving me much.

 

[jgreco]

Right. Go look in the N00b forum at this post, then at the hardware recommendations and notice that 8GB is the minimum. But for iSCSI, you really probably want 16GB, else you'll run into all sorts of delightful issues.

For what you want to do, FreeNAS may not be the right product, or at least, not with ZFS.

 

[Deland01]

Right. Go look in the N00b forum at this post, then at the hardware recommendations and notice that 8GB is the minimum. But for iSCSI, you really probably want 16GB, else you'll run into all sorts of delightful issues.

For what you want to do, FreeNAS may not be the right product, or at least, not with ZFS.

Thanks for the advice, if only I'd seen this a month ago, would have saved myself a load of hassle....

I picked FreeNAS as someone did a guide on how to build a VM test lab online& this is what they recommended. The guide never mentioned about needing this much RAM though or any hardware recommendations.

So in short I need a SAN I can host virtually for my vSphere 5.5 test lab which i can create iSCSI & NFS LUNs which can handle multipathing. I'm working towards my VCP5 & need to be able to have as much of a proper setup as possible but unfortunately I don't have spare cash or space for hardware. Last year I used some software by starwinds to set a test iSCSI server up with to hyperV hosts connecting to it so might give that a go unless youncan suggest any alternative?

 

[jgreco]

ZFS is really incredibly heavyweight for light experimentation in a lab environment, especially if the lab is two 4GB ESXi hypervisors running on VMware Workstation. I don't really have any particular suggestions as to what might be an alternative, but I assure you there's a wide variety of free NAS packages ranging from NAS4Free, to Openfiler, etc. I strongly suggest you avoid ZFS and instead focus on something that'll just handle iSCSI direct from a raw device (which of course in your environment is virtual anyways). Adding layers and layers of complexity just slows things down.

Also, FreeNAS supports UFS, for a smaller footprint, but I haven't recently tried setting up iSCSI on a UFS file-based extent or something like that.