$ /bin/cormier --tagline

Troubleshooting iSCSI connections… we have all been there, at the data center or your desk trying to solve some dead path issue. I like to drop back to the CLI for this task as it’s much easier to get the information out of VMware for troubleshooting purposes, and the Web clients don’t always have the most current information, without requiring a refresh.

First, let’s get a physical layout of the land we are dealing with on this host.

[root@esxi:~] esxcfg-nics -l
Name    PCI          Driver      Link Speed     Duplex MAC Address       MTU   
vmnic0  0000:01:00.0 tg3         Up   1000Mbps  Full   b8:2a:72:dc:2d:e8 1500
vmnic1  0000:01:00.1 tg3         Up   1000Mbps  Full   b8:2a:72:dc:2d:e9 1500
vmnic2  0000:02:00.0 tg3         Up   1000Mbps  Full   b8:2a:72:dc:2d:ea 9000
vmnic3  0000:02:00.1 tg3         Up   1000Mbps  Full   b8:2a:72:dc:2d:eb 9000
vmnic4  0000:05:00.0 tg3         Up   1000Mbps  Full   00:0a:f7:64:54:9c 1500
vmnic5  0000:05:00.1 tg3         Up   1000Mbps  Full   00:0a:f7:64:54:9d 1500
vmnic6  0000:05:00.2 tg3         Up   1000Mbps  Full   00:0a:f7:64:54:9e 9000
vmnic7  0000:05:00.3 tg3         Up   1000Mbps  Full   00:0a:f7:64:54:9f 9000
[root@esxi:~]

Recently I found myself having to perform a walk of physical connections of some ESXi hosts and two (2) QNAP storage arrays being used for storage of VMware Virtual Machines (VM). The idea was to remove the Network Port Binding from two (2) of the four (4) iSCSI VMK adapters, move the adapters to the destination switch.

The first step was to remove the two (2) VMK adapters network bindings from the ESXi host, forcing the iSCSI traffic to the remaining two (2) VMK adapters that are still binding.

I recently had to reset and set up a Dell EqualLogic PS4000 SAN array. At the same time, I decided to upgrade the firmware on the array, before placing it back into production. This a rough transcript and comments of that process.

Staying current with firmware or just loading up firmware for testing. New firmware can be copied from a USB FAT32 partition to switch image locations. Copy the firmware, for example, N3000_N2000v6.3.0.6.stk to a newly formatted USB flash drive.