John DeVito
Cadet
- Joined
- Jun 14, 2011
- Messages
- 3
Hello all.
I looked through this "Sharing" section of the forum to see if anyone has asked my question and didn't see anything, so I wanted to post and ask about behavior I am seeing when I reboot or power off/on a FreeNAS that I am using for iSCSI.
I have a Dell 1950III running vSphere 4.1 ESXi that I use as a lab. I am sorely overallocated on disk space, but that's another story. I have a couple of 32 bit machines that I was playing around with to test the viability of using FreeNAS to facilitate iSCSI storage to take care of my problem.
One is a PIII with 128M of RAM and the other a Celeron with 512M of RAM. I install FreeNAS 8 on a hard disk in the PIII and on a USB thumb drive on the Celeron machine. I configured iSCSI and set up storage on the machines as datastores on my VMware host. It worked fine and I was able to copy files to and from the iSCSI targets. I also installed a couple of 2008R2 servers. They ran fine. Not the greatest performance in the world, but I am realistic about the fact that I was testing on some pretty sorry hardware. Actually, if I am being objective I would have to say I was pretty pleased.
Even the PIII machine, which was seriously challenged from both a processor and memory perspective, did pretty well. The install of the OS took a little longer than I would have liked, but the time was still reasonable and after the install was complete the FreeNAS box showed a marked decrease in processor and memory utilization. Just running through things on the VM was quite acceptable.
The problem I had with both machines was the behavior of the iSCSI connection upon power up of the system.
I always made sure the FreeNAS box was the first to the party and the last to leave.
If I rebooted (or shut down and powered on) the VMware host and left the FreeNAS box running the whole time then the iSCSI connection was restored when the VMware host came back up. All was good.
If I shut down the VMware host, then rebooted or powered off/on the FreeNAS box, and then after FreeNAS was up for a short period of time brought the VMware host back up then I could not see the iSCSI storage. Rescanning the storage never gave a positive result. If I turned iSCSI off and back on then rescanned the storage from VMware then the datastores I had created came back up and the VMs were fine.
Not a huge deal because, like I said, I am using this for labbing stuff. It's not like I am running my business on it. I can always just toggle the iSCSI and rescan whenever I bring the system up. I'm just wondering what I may have missed.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
John
I looked through this "Sharing" section of the forum to see if anyone has asked my question and didn't see anything, so I wanted to post and ask about behavior I am seeing when I reboot or power off/on a FreeNAS that I am using for iSCSI.
I have a Dell 1950III running vSphere 4.1 ESXi that I use as a lab. I am sorely overallocated on disk space, but that's another story. I have a couple of 32 bit machines that I was playing around with to test the viability of using FreeNAS to facilitate iSCSI storage to take care of my problem.
One is a PIII with 128M of RAM and the other a Celeron with 512M of RAM. I install FreeNAS 8 on a hard disk in the PIII and on a USB thumb drive on the Celeron machine. I configured iSCSI and set up storage on the machines as datastores on my VMware host. It worked fine and I was able to copy files to and from the iSCSI targets. I also installed a couple of 2008R2 servers. They ran fine. Not the greatest performance in the world, but I am realistic about the fact that I was testing on some pretty sorry hardware. Actually, if I am being objective I would have to say I was pretty pleased.
Even the PIII machine, which was seriously challenged from both a processor and memory perspective, did pretty well. The install of the OS took a little longer than I would have liked, but the time was still reasonable and after the install was complete the FreeNAS box showed a marked decrease in processor and memory utilization. Just running through things on the VM was quite acceptable.
The problem I had with both machines was the behavior of the iSCSI connection upon power up of the system.
I always made sure the FreeNAS box was the first to the party and the last to leave.
If I rebooted (or shut down and powered on) the VMware host and left the FreeNAS box running the whole time then the iSCSI connection was restored when the VMware host came back up. All was good.
If I shut down the VMware host, then rebooted or powered off/on the FreeNAS box, and then after FreeNAS was up for a short period of time brought the VMware host back up then I could not see the iSCSI storage. Rescanning the storage never gave a positive result. If I turned iSCSI off and back on then rescanned the storage from VMware then the datastores I had created came back up and the VMs were fine.
Not a huge deal because, like I said, I am using this for labbing stuff. It's not like I am running my business on it. I can always just toggle the iSCSI and rescan whenever I bring the system up. I'm just wondering what I may have missed.
Any ideas?
Thanks,
John
