Updates

So I’ve been neglecting this site really badly.

I’ve been insanely busy with all kinds of things.  So whats new;

Got my Citrix CCIA certification, woohoo!!  Now just waiting on some Citrix projects 🙂

 

In the meantime i’m doing more FlexPod’s.  I am working on an update document for my iSCSI boot.  I found that the new UCS 2.0(2r) i belive added the IQN Pools, so some of the screenshots changed, however the process is basicly the same.

I’ve also been writing a lot of internal documentation right now, so the thought of writing more when i’m “off the clock” hasn’t been fun.  Thats coming to a bit of an end, so i’m going to start writing more here again.  I’ve come across some interesting things lately.

iSCSI Boot with ESXi 5.0 & UCS Blades

UPDATE:: The issue was the NIC/HBA Placement Policy.  The customer had set a policy to have the HBA’s first, then the iSCSI Overlay NIC, then the remaining NICs.  When we moved the iSCSI NIC to the bottom of the list, the ESXi 5.0 installer worked just fine.  I’m not 100% sure why this fix is actually working, but either way it works.

So at a recent customers site i was trying to configure iSCSI Booting of ESXi 5.0 on a UCS Blade, B230 M2.  To make a long story short it doesn’t fully work and isn’t offically supported by Cisco.  In fact, NO blade models are supported for ESXi 5.0 & iSCSI boot by Cisco.  They claim a fix is on the way, and i will post an update when there is a fix.

Here is the exact issue, and my orgianal thoughts, in case it helps anybody;

We got an error installing ESXi 5 to a Netapp LUN.  Got an error “Expecting 2 bootbanks, found 0” at 90% of the install of ESXi. The blade is a B230 M2.

The LUN is seen in BIOS as well as by the ESXi 5 installer.  I even verified the “Details” option, and all the information is correct.

Doing an Alt-F12 during the install and watching the logs more closely today, at ~90% it appears to be unloading a module, that appears by its’ name, to be some sort of vmware tools type package.  As SOON as it does that the installer claims that there is no IP address on the iSCSI NIC and begins to look for DHCP.  The issue is during the configuration of the Service Profile and the iSCSI NIC, at no time did we choose DHCP, we choose static. (We even have tried Pooled)  Since there is no DHCP Server in that subnet it doesn’t pickup an address and thus loses connectivity to the LUN.

So we rebooted the blade after the error, and ESXi5 actually loads with no errors.  The odd thing is that the root password that’s specified isn’t set, it’s blank like ESXi 4.x was.

So an interesting question is what’s happening during that last 10% of the installation of ESXi 5??  Since it boots cleanly, it almost seems like it does a sort of “sysprep” of the OS, ie all the configuration details.  If that’s the only issue then it might technically be ok.  However I don’t get the “warm and fuzzies”.  My concern would be that, maybe not today but down the road some module that wasn’t loaded correctly will come back to bite the client.

Also, what is happening in that last 10% that’s different then ESXi 4.x??  We were able to load 4.1 just fine with no errors.

Again we called Cisco TAC and we were told that ESXi 5 iSCSI booting wasn’t supported on any blade.  They do support 4.1 as well as Windows, and a variety of Linux Distos.

Lack of Posts

Well i know i was supossed to start writing more, but things have been nuts between rebuilding our lab at work and my home life i haven’t had time.

I’m going to list my upcoming topics so that maybe i actually remember to write them….

iSCSI vs NFS Testing results on ESX 4.1

Discovery of correlation between vCPU count and VMFS write speed

Properly enabling iSCSI and connecting targets in RHEL 5

DataDomain and BOOST

My PrivateCloud Lab

Discovered issues with vCenter as a VM and running dvSwitches