Part of my home lab uses HP n40l’s as hosts and a whitebox with VMware workstation 9 for various VM’s mostly storage based. However using VMware workstation isn’t without considerations when building an environment like this.
Using products such as Starwind, QUADStor, Openfiler or Freenas (among many others) you may find when deploying iscsi from the storage appliances that whilst the target is visible within the static discovery tab you are unable to find the new targets when scanning for datastores or adding new storage.
This typically happens I’ve found if you have a storage appliance running on bridged networking within VMware workstation and attempt to connect your physical vSphere hosts to the virtual storage appliance. As in the example video below I have a QUADStor appliance (10.10.10.100)on a bridged networking within VMware workstation which needs to act as storage for my physical hosts (HP n40l’s). They have a separate vswitch also on the 10.10.10.x network which is iscsi port bound. As you can see in the video adding the target addresses allows the target to be seen but not connected too.
Its no great secret that Iscsi port binding does not support routing however using port binding also causes the above behavior as well. To be honest I’m not sure why removing port binding is required to make this kind of setup work as there is no “routing” to speak of but as this is my home lab I’m quite happy to omit port binding from my config.
Author: Dale Scriven
