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Use Case Study: Using Active System For VMware Cluster Environment Configuration

Configure Redundant Hypervisor Management Network

Upon initial setup of the host, vmnic2 was selected as the management NIC, this corresponds to the B1

fabric mezzanine card port 1 partition 1 of the CNA. Another NIC (vmnic3) will be added for

redundancy and will corresponds to port 2 partition 1 of the B2 fabric mezzanine card. Both of these

virtual NICs will be configured for VLAN 28 which was already configured on the vSphere switch

carrying the management traffic. Here another NIC will be added to the vSwitch. In the vSphere Client,

access the host networking under the “Configuration” tab, vSwitch0 has already been configured for

the management network. Select the “Properties” link near the vSwitch and switch to the “Network

Adapters” tab. Click the “Add” button to add the second NIC. In this case vmnic3 corresponds to the

redundant partition which will carry the hypervisor management traffic. This NIC is selected in the

“Add Adapter Wizard”. Continuing with the wizard, configure the failover order such that vmnic3 is

specified as a “standby adapter”. Then finish the configuration wizard. There are now two adapters

configured for management traffic, one active and one standby for vSwitch0.

Configure iSCSI Network and Storage Adapters When Using EqualLogic Storage

To view the iSCSI hardware adapters available on your host in the vCenter management console, go to

the “Configuration” tab for that host and select the link to “Storage Adapters”. As mentioned

previously, during server Deployment, Active System Manager assigned storage IQNs to the Broadcom

57810 adapters which we designated as iSCSI connections. Because Active System Manager cannot

modify the configuration of the ESXi host software, we need to manually configure the IQN names of

the storage adapters in ESXi to match what Active System Manager has designated. Review your Active

System Manager deployment details to obtain the IQNs of each of the two iSCSI adapters. Based on your

Active System Manager deployment configuration you should see two Broadcom iSCSI adapters listed on

the configuration pages in vCenter, because they were enabled for iSCSI. To change the IQN name,

right click on the first Broadcom iSCSI adapter and select properties. Under the “General” tab click the

“Configure” button to configure the iSCSI IQN and/or alias for this adapter. Since an iSCSI IQN was from

the Active System Manager pool, it is recommended to enter the IQN assigned by Active System

Manager for consistency, but if you wish to use a different IQN you may. Note that VMware software

does check for the correct IQN format and will not let you enter a value if it doesn’t follow the IQN

naming specification referenced earlier in this document. Repeat this process for the second adapter.

In order to make connections to the iSCSI networking, the Broadcom 57810 adapter support in ESXi

requires that a vSphere switch and vmkernel are created to associate with the Broadcom CNA for iSCSI

traffic. As previously mentioned ports 1 and ports 2 of the Broadcom CNA have been configured for

iSCSI traffic at the hardware level, these correspond to vmnic0 and vmnic1 on the ESXi host. When

using Equallogic storage, this configuration will be handled for you via the EqualLogic MEM.

To obtain the MEM software and the latest detailed instructions on using the Dell EqualLogic MEM see

the EqualLogic support pages at https://support.equallogic.com/secure/login.aspx.

For this example, the vSphere CLI was used to install the Dell EqualLogic MEM on each host. First the

ESXi host was placed in maintenance mode. Then the EqualLogic MEM was downloaded and made

available on the vSphere management server. From the vCLI command prompt, change to the directory

where the MEM was stored and type the following command:

setup.pl --install --server=<ESXi host IP address> --bundle=<bundle file

name>