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69707
July 11th, 2015 12:00
Help please :-{ R430 i350 iSCSI no vmhba
Hi everyone, hopefully someone can help. We are installing new R430's to replace our aging 2950's and we purchased them with the Intel i350 Quad port cards specifically because they are supposed to have iSCSI ToE support. When I built up our first server however I do not see the hba's in the storage adapters.
I downloaded and installed the latest igb VIB that was available from VMWare's site. I configured the iSCSI settings in the BIOS for the static IP's we're reclaiming from our 2950s (I didn't specify targets in the system BIOS because I'm not booting from iSCSI and I want to configure my pathing with static discoveries on each HBA to split up load and round robin with alternating the target IPs from vSphere)
All I see in the storage adapters are the Wellsburg AHCI Controller and the MegaRAID SAS Invader Controller:
I have the nic's configured in their own vSwitches/VMKernel ports and they have connectivity to my iSCSI vlan and can ping the targets (there are no firewalls and this is a single flat vlan on a dedicated switch):
I appreciate any help anyone can offer as I need to get this system online asap.
Thank you!! :)
jmarti80
1 Message
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August 27th, 2015 09:00
I am having this exact same issue. Did you happen to find a fix for this?
davery23
23 Posts
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August 27th, 2015 10:00
As Donald stated there doesn't seem to be VMWare certified drivers that support iSCSI HW ToE, I tried at Dell's suggestion going back to their Custom ISO for VMWare ESXi 5.5 and it didn't have HBA support either.
I also tried several other driver revisions and none of them would show the NIC as an iSCSI HW HBA.
We had the same exact experience with Intel X540-T2 nics we put in our FX2 chassis', they have an option to boot iSCSI but once you load the OS they are not technically iSCSI HBAs.
In both cases we ended up going with the Software iSCSI adapter bound to vmk's on the physical NICs. A shame because the Intel White Sheets sell them to the consumer as something they are not.
I do appreciate Dell's assistance in trying to help me resolve the issue. While frustrating only because we felt we paid for HW HBAs, there is of course nothing wrong with SW iSCSI, my R430 cluster is running just fine, and our FX2 chassis haven't seen any issue other than it seems to take a little longer to detect the NIC port disconnect when we manually pull the cable to simulate failure but the datastore never experienced a disconnect while the second path was available.
I'll stick to the Broadcom's in the future, we mainly chose the i350 because this was a remote office with only Gigabit infrastructure. Our Main datacenters have 10Gb and the X540-T2 seemed very cost effective but we were disappointed that the same situation existed with the HBA function.