StarWind SMI-S and integrations with SCVMM 2012

Tue Jun 11, 2013 3:32 pm

madmagi,

said hi to the people at your booth.

Cool! My colleagues gave me your regards )

Will i have any issue using SP2 when it is out later this month?

We work with MS on this now

Will give this a go as soon as i can get some time and i will let you know how it works.

OK. I will wait.

sumitshekhar1 · Thu Jul 04, 2013 6:22 pm

Hi,

I am performing test in my lab and successfully allocated the Storage Pool and LUN to Host groups.

When I open the Storage properties of Hyper-V host I see the iSCSI Array already added but the ADD Disk button is greyed out. I have already created a target in Starwind and attached the Image file to it.
Below is screenshot:

Can anyone please assist to fix this issue.

Tue Jul 09, 2013 6:22 am

Hi sumitshekhar1,

1) You are using too old version of SCVMM. Please use SCVMM 2012 SP1 or higher (SC VMM 2012 R2, for example).
2) Create 1 empty target on StarWind Service and perform a "Refresh" operation on HyperV hosts and a "Rescan" operation on SMI-S Provider. Then you should be able to add iSCSI Array and create disks from mentioned dialog window.

Adding of iSCSI Array in terms of VMM means adding new Discovery Portals to iSCSI Initiator of the given HyperV host. If this Discovery portals already added there then VMM shows you that iSCSI Array already added. But without existence of empty target on StarWind Service SC VMM can't check "Can the HyperV host reach iSCSI Service host?" and, because of that, it "thinks" that you can't use created disks and so prevents you from creating it.

--
Best regards,
Yuriy.

sumitshekhar1 · Thu Jul 11, 2013 7:22 am

Hi Yuriy,

Thanks for the response.

The Base OS of SCVMM is Win 2008 R2 SP1. For SCVMM 2012 SP1 or R2 I will need to upgrade the base OS to Win 2012. Is there any possibilities to use the same OS and SCVMM for testing this feature. If this is the limitation/bug in SCVMM 2012 then I will definitely have to upgrade the both.

I have created another starwind storage server and created a empty target in it. Then added that server to storage provider in SCVMM and created a test LUN associated with classification. Allocated the Storage Array and new LUN to the hyper-V host group.
I was able to add this ISCSI Array successfully to one hyper-v host properties but still ADD Disk button is greyed out as below screenshot.

I have then checked the ISCSI Initiator on that Hyper-V host and found that the Target is discovered and is in connected state as below screenshot.

Can you please suggest why I am still unable to add the disk on the Hyper-V Host through SCVMM.

Thu Jul 11, 2013 8:41 am

Hi sumitshekhar1,

Can you please suggest why I am still unable to add the disk on the Hyper-V Host through SCVMM.

I suggest to perform this steps:
1) Restart StarWind SMI-S Agent service
2) Rescan of SMI-S provider in SC VMM
3) Refresh of HyperV host in SC VMM

The Base OS of SCVMM is Win 2008 R2 SP1. For SCVMM 2012 SP1 or R2 I will need to upgrade the base OS to Win 2012. Is there any possibilities to use the same OS and SCVMM for testing this feature. If this is the limitation/bug in SCVMM 2012 then I will definitely have to upgrade the both.

If steps, mentioned above, all done and "Add Disk" button is still grayed, then I propose you to update your OS to Windows Server 2012 R2 and SC VMM to "R2" version also.

--
Best regards,
Yuriy.

sumitshekhar1 · Sun Jul 21, 2013 5:36 am

Hi Yuriy,

Thanks for the reply. Yes I have already performed all the above steps that you mentioned but the result was same.

Will check after upgrading OS and SCVMM version. Hope that will fix the issue.

Mon Jul 22, 2013 7:36 am

Hi sumitshekhar1,

New version of SMI-S Agent will be available soon. Stay tuned.

--
Yuriy

nstylin777 · Sat Jul 27, 2013 9:33 am

Hi I'm trying to create a 2 node Hyper-V cluster using SCVMM 2012 SP1 (Server 2012) with Hyper-V R3 nodes (Server 2012) in a lab environment using the iSCSI SAN (a Server 2012 VM) and SMI-S Agent (v1.0).

I've followed the instructions in the "Using-StarWind-SMI-S-Agent-with-SC-VMM-2012-SP1.pdf" and can successfully create LUNs in SCVMM and attached individual disks to Hyper-V nodes. However if I try to create a Hyper-V Cluster using the created LUNS (1 for quorum and 1 for data) I get the following errors.

I can confirm that both Hyper-V hosts are attached to the storage array since I can add individual disks to a single host successfully through VMM using the SMI-S agent.

: Capture.JPG (68.22 KiB) Viewed 679203 times

Has anybody seen this before?

nstylin777 · Sat Jul 27, 2013 9:36 am

here is the detailed errors for previous post

: Capture1.JPG (110.95 KiB) Viewed 679206 times

Mon Aug 12, 2013 8:12 am

nstylin777,

nstylin777 wrote:Hi I'm trying to create a 2 node Hyper-V cluster using SCVMM 2012 SP1 (Server 2012) with Hyper-V R3 nodes (Server 2012) in a lab environment using the iSCSI SAN (a Server 2012 VM) and SMI-S Agent (v1.0).
...
Has anybody seen this before?

I suggest you to wait for StarWind V8 beta + StarWind SMI-S Agent V1.0 beta and to try it again.
We have a lot of improvements that should solve many problems.
Thank you for understanding!

--
Best regards,
Yuriy.

hendryjl · Tue Aug 13, 2013 4:05 am

Got an ETA on the next Beta?

I am seeking to do the same setup. I have a Windows 2012 SC VMM SP1 file server using SMB 3.0 (and SMI-S, but focused on the SMB 3.0 for now) and I'm wanting to add storage from my WD DX4000 Sentinel running Windows 2008 R2 Storage Server that I currently have setup via starwind iSCSI using SMI-S in hoped of making clustered HA storage out of it in the end. I am doing my VLANs in such a way to simulate that the NAS is "offsite" and is a live replica of the local storage for DR. I am not using the R2 versions of Windows 2012 or SCVMM at this point though. Will the beta require them?

If I can't get something up and going soon, I'm going to just bail on it and hack the Sentinel to have Windows Server 2012 on it, but that's my last resort.

Tue Aug 13, 2013 8:01 am

hendryjl,

hendryjl wrote: I am not using the R2 versions of Windows 2012 or SCVMM at this point though. Will the beta require them?

Only SCVMM 2012 R2 along with Windows Server 2012 R2 has all needed bugfixes that allows to normally USE (not only run) our SMI-S Agent.
StarWind V8 and SMI-S Agent you can normally run under Windows 2008 R2. So, you can setup StarWind V8 and SMI-S on your Sentinel Storage Server and connect to it from SCVMM 2012 R2 that runs under Windows Server 2012 R2.

--
Best regards,
Yuriy.

hendryjl · Tue Aug 13, 2013 4:07 pm

Great point. Now I just get to choose between the next beta timeframe (any idea) and pushing to the prereleases of the two R2 revs, versus hacking the Sentinel to Windows 2012 and just doing SMB.

Tue Aug 13, 2013 4:25 pm

hendryjl wrote:Great point. Now I just get to choose between the next beta timeframe (any idea) and pushing to the prereleases of the two R2 revs, versus hacking the Sentinel to Windows 2012 and just doing SMB.

Good!
We have plans to publish StarWind V8 Beta in about next 10 days.

hendryjl · Tue Sep 03, 2013 7:42 pm

How's that 10 days coming? Still holding out to use this instead of hacking my Sentinel