Use Previous iSCSI Extent for rebuilt FreeNAS Setup (failed OS drive)

[s3rv3rn3rd]

The flash drive i was using for my FreeNAS setup crapped out (yeah, yeah, i know - won't be using Flash Drives going forward). The drives and everything appears to be fine but obviously I lost all of my config.

I've imported the existing datasets and pools and that is working fine. I've got iSCSI communicating back to my VMWare hosts just fine. All of that appears to be working as expected. I created a new extent that's the same size as the files I'm seeing for the dataset (ll -h to the /mnt/drivename). When i got into VMWare it shows it as degraded (FreeNAS does not show it as degraded). When you look at the drive in VMWare it shows a VMFS formatted datastore but i can't apparently access it. I feel as though I'm messing something up with the extent since there was an existing one there.

How do I point my FreeNAS iSCSI config at the extent that was being shared previously to VMWare?

Any help would be appreciated so I don't lose all my data.

 

[s3rv3rn3rd]

Well I ended up solving this one myself so I thought I'd include what I did in case anyone else runs into this.

Go into the CLI for the FreeNAS box and navigate to the /mnt directory and do an ll -h to get a human-readable capacity for the drives. This step isn't necessary if you know the sizes of your drives.

Now go into the FreeNAS site and create a new extent that is at least as large as what you identified as the size and then connect the extent to the target.

Once that's done, go into the CLI for the VMWare host and you'll want to list out the volumes with:

Code:

esxcfg-volume –l

That will show you whether or not VMWare sees the volume. Now that you have the UID and name you can do this:

Code:

esxcli storage vmfs snapshot list

esxcli storage vmfs snapshot mount -l label|-u uuid

Then you can refresh the page in VCenter and you should see the datastore.

References:

VMware Knowledge Base

kb.vmware.com