Virtual storage unavailable on power up or reboot

[tareco]

Hi guys. This is my first post.

Congratulations to the FreeNAS team on a fantastic piece of software, very well done.

I have a host with a few disks setup for testing purposes:

* ESXi 5.1 is installed on disk1
* FreeNAS 8.3.0 VM was added to datastore1 (also on disk1)
* Remaining disks are presented to FreeNAS as raw devices (RDM vmdk files on datastore1)
* FreeNAS has a RAID-Z ZFS volume using those disks
* The volume is presented and added to ESXi as iSCSI LUN (datastore2)
* A test VM is added to ESXi inside the iSCSI LUN (datastore2)
* VMs are set to autostart: FreeNAS first, 10 minutes later the test VM

The problem is all is working fine except the autostart part.
If I reboot or power up the ESXi host, the second VM is shown as "unavailable" in the inventory and never boots.
The cause is that ESXi lost datastore2 because FreeNAS was not ready at the time of ESXi boot...
After I manually "Rescan All..." under storage, the datastore reapears and then I can manually boot the test VM.

Of course I'd like to be able to autostart both VMs... but it seems like a chicken-egg problem.

Is there any way around this? How does HP VSA and other commercial VSAs accomplish this?

Thank you for any hint!

 

[Nik]

Same problem here. Didn't find a solution yet. My workaround is to use NFS instead.
Maybe it is possible to launch a cronjob on Freenas which logs into the ESXi and launches a datastore rescan script on the ESXi after each Freenas reboot.
No idea if this could work.