Esxi, HBA pass through and CVM

[Bob-Check]

Hi people, what am I missing?

Dual R630 servers with 2 port 12GB Hba's 4 port 10GBe , dual EMC 24 disk SAS enclosure, 2 x 4 port controller's. One server has 2 cables going to one enclosure, 1 cable to controller A and the other cable to controller B. The other server is cabled the same.

Following the deployment guide, two CVM's were deployed and setup with dual Sync and dual iSCSI 10GBe, and the SAS controller's are in pass through mode. Hosts were "added" together, and HA setup. So far, so good.
Now this is where it falls apart. Since each server/array has two connections, all the disks are showing in the cvm as the usual sd* , but when going to create a volume, it states i need to add disk, even though it presents 96 of them.

So I split the systems apart to focus on just one set of hardware, no difference. In the OS of the CVM, I installed and configured multipath and now have the disks showing in the OS a 24 x DM#'s and all physical disks are fully seen with multipath -ll . After a reboot and rescan on the cvm it's still enumerating all the sd# and doesn't show md#'s.

What am I missing?

1. Can't create volume even though there are disks listed.
2. How to handle the dual cable dual sd# per disk (assumed SWCVM would be smart and map WWN to a single device)
3. Now I have the MD's in the OS, but they don't show in CVM

Sort of assume that this all has to be configure via CLI anyway, but man the doco is disjointed. TBH, this setup would be very "vanilla" and the lack of a "simple" setup, i don't get it.

Any thought will be appreciated.

Cheers, Lee

[yaroslav (staff)]

HI,

Can you please pull the logs from CVM and upload them here https://www.starwindsoftware.com/support-form? Use 1507600 as the "existing case" number.

[Bob-Check]

Thanks, done.

[yaroslav (staff)]

Hi,

Thanks for your patience.
StarWind Linux-based installations are not intended/tested with dual controllers. The web UI does not work for such configs.
But there's a workaround. It was not tested, though.
You can install multipath and target mpathX devices while creating MDADM. Then, you need to create LVM (PV and VG) and format it as XFS. Then, you will see the volume under the Volumes tab.

Thanks for surfacing such a limitation, and good luck with your project!

[Bob-Check]

Thanks for confirming.
Mpath / md was all done, but I stopped at LVM to ask the question, so I'll keep going.
Cheers,
Lee.

[yaroslav (staff)]

Yeah, that bit is not straightforward. You can technically skip LVM and go XFS without it, but it will not show in GUI.