I hope you already know VMware Software Defined Storage Solution, vSAN is a leading solution for its enterprise customers and it comes with the vSAN iSCSI Target Service to access the vSAN datastore from the outside vSAN Cluster. This VMware vSAN iSCSI target service can be used to provide the additional storage to the other servers to facilitate the storage requirements. The configuration is quite simple and straight forward and I decided to publish this article to show the complete step-by-step guide to provision storage using this iSCSI Target Service from VMware vSAN.
Adding iSCSI Target And LUN
To start the Configuration, select the vSAN Cluster and go to the “Configure” tab. Select the “iSCSI Target Service” and click on “Enable“. If you can’t see the iSCSI Target service and see some error with the versions try this which describes in my previous article.
Toggle the option to enable the service in the cluster, by default this service is not enabled
Once you enable the service, select the default iSCSI target network vmkernel adapter, default port and the authentication mechanism at the time of writing this article VMware vSAN supports CHAP and Mutual CHAP authentication methods
Select the Storage Policy for the vSAN Home Objects, this can be created separately and the policy will be listed in the drop down menu
Check the recent task list of the service enablement and wait until it completes the running tasks
Once the service successfully enabled click on “Add” to add the targets
Provide the details such as IQN (I usually select the system generated IQN), Alias, vSAN Storage Policy specific to the iSCSI Target, vmkernel, TCP Port and Authentication
Created iSCSI Target will be listed and iSCSI LUN should be created after that, to do that click on “Add” under the created target
Provide the LUN details such as LUN ID, Alias, Storage Policy and Size, click “Add” to complete the LUN addition
Created LUN will visible as below once it confirmed, Make a note of the “I/O Owner Host” before we move in to the next step
Add iSCSI LUN To The Windows Operating System
After successfully creating the iSCSI Target and LUN, it can be mounted to other devices to provide the storage requirements. Here, let’s see how we can configure the Windows Operating system to map the LUN as a Hard Drive.
Search “iSCSI Initiator” in the Start Menu
In the “Target:” text box type the “I/O Owner Host” address which noted in the previous step and click on “Quick Connect…“
Once the connection successful, you can see the login status as “Connected“, click “Done“
Connection status will show as connected, if everything is configured properly
Perform the disk initialization process in the Operating System in the Server Manager under Disks Management console
Once the disk configuration is done disk will be visible in the Explorer
Remove VMware vSAN iSCSI Target LUN
To Remove the iSCSI Target LUN Select LUN under iSCSI Target Service and click on “Remove“
Click on “Remove“
To remove the iSCSI Target Click on “Remove” in the vSAN iSCSI Target
These are the basic operations for the VMware vSAN iSCSI Target configurations, I hope this post is useful for the similar configurations in a vSAN configured environment.
Subhash Unnikrishnan
May 28, 2021What needs to be done if i want to reboot the host that is providing I/O.
As i checked moving the host in maintenance mode does not shift the I/O to another host in vSAN cluster.
Aruna Lakmal
July 12, 2021I think that is true, enabling the maintenance mode will vacate the running VMs, I think you need to perform full data migration. Have you tried this: https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/6.7/com.vmware.vsphere.virtualsan.doc/GUID-521EA4BC-E411-47D4-899A-5E0264469866.html