Creating iSCSI multipath IO network in vSphere v5 with ReadyNAS as a storage

The objective is to setup MPIO iSCSI connection between VM host running ESXi v5 and a ReadyNas 3200 storage.

ReadyNAS NIC Setup

Create a vSwitch for the NIC’s.

We will be associating each vmnic with a vmKernel port:

Select your EXSi host | Configuration | Networking | Choose Add Networking:

Select  your NICs (vmnic2 & 3 in my case) – click NextThen enter a name in the Network Label box (vSwitch2) – click Next and Finish.Now go into the Properties of the vSwitch:

Click the add button to add vmkernel ports:Enter the Network label (i.e. ISCSI2 – click NextAssign IP address to the NIC – click Next then FinishDo this for all NICs so my end result looks like this:

Now we need to  assign 1 NIC on each of the vmKernel ports. Select the first vmKernel port and click Edit:

Select NIC teaming and check Override switch failover order. We mus have only 1 vmnic active.

Do this for the remaining vmnic(s)

Testing

SSH into the ESXi host and attempt to ping all ReadyNAS IP addresses using vmkping command

ESXi 5 iSCSI initiator

By default ESXi 5 does not have the iSCSI Software Adapter loaded.
Select the ESXi host | Configuration | Storage Adapters | Add

Now select the iSCSI storage adapter and select properties.
Copy the name into your clipboard.  So we can paste it into the access control list on the ReadyNAS LUN.

Now back to the ESXi host.
On the iSCSI Initiator select network configuration. And add all of the vmkernel groups iSCSI1, iSCSI2

Select Dynamic Discovery and add your target.  Only add one IP for your ReadyNAS

Select the Static Discovery tab and all 2 paths should be shown:

Go to Configuration | Storage
And you should see your LUN.

Right click on the LUN and choose properties.

Select Mange Paths

By default ESXi is set to Most Recently Used (VMware).  So we have 2 nic’s but only 1 will be used.  We need to change the path selection to Round Robin.

Select round robin from the drop down press change.  Now you will see all 2 adapters are set to active i/o.  Press Close.

Final tweaking

By default, VMware has set a limit of 1000 IO’s to travel down each path before switching to the next path. However by changing that default down to 1 IO before switching paths we can sometimes achieve much greater throughput because we can more effectively utilize our links.

Enable the SSH console on your ESXi 5.0 host.

The command for ESXi5 is:
esxcli storage nmp psp roundrobin deviceconfig set -d naa.devicename --iops 1 --type iops

and to get the device name you could use:

esxcli storage nmp device list | grep naa.600

To verify, enter the following command to verify:
esxcli storage nmp device list 

You should see the following string showing IOPs now equal to one!
t10.F405E46494C45425F4D614162357D2354745A4D295162773
Device Display Name: OPNFILER iSCSI Disk (t10.F405E46494C45425F4D614162357D2354745A4D295162773)
Storage Array Type: VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AA
Storage Array Type Device Config: SATP VMW_SATP_DEFAULT_AA does not support device configuration.
Path Selection Policy: VMW_PSP_RR
Path Selection Policy Device Config: {policy=iops,iops=1,bytes=10485760,useANO=0;lastPathIndex=2: NumIOsPending=0,numBytesPending=0}
Path Selection Policy Device Custom Config:
Working Paths: vmhba33:C0:T3:L4, vmhba33:C1:T3:L4, vmhba33:C2:T3:L4, vmhba33:C3:T3:L4 

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