Release Notes

Data Drives
15 Best Practices for Implementing VMware vSphere in a Dell PS Series Storage Environment | TR1091 | v1.3
• Requires storage team intervention. Since it is a brand new volume, you need to create the volume to
be seen by the VM not the vSphere environment. This means installing and configuring the iSCSI
software initiator, connecting to the SAN with proper pathing, configuring and formatting the volume to
be seen by the VM.
• Needs to be considered for DR plans separate from VMs. Because the volume is not seen by vCenter
or any of the VMware tools (like Site Recovery Manager), they need to be put into the recovery and
protection plans according to their SLAs.
6.2.1 iSCSI in the guest VM best practices
Configuring iSCSI in the guest VM is the same as configuring it for a physical server. Install the iSCSI initiator
into the guest VM, connect to the SAN and format the presented volume. There are, however, some
considerations to think about on the ESX servers.
1. Normally the iSCSI network and Public LAN network are isolated so you first have to make sure that
the VM can see the PS Series storage.
2. Verify the VM is configured properly to take advantage of MPIO inside the guest VM if you need it.
3. Modify the vSwitch that is delivering iSCSI traffic to include two iSCSI Guest Port Groups.
In the diagram below, the iSCSI Guest Port Groups are iSCSI Guest 1 and iSCSI Guest 2. These are
created on the vSwitch that already communicates on the SAN network.
4. Once the iSCSI Guest Port Groups are created, guarantee traffic across the physical NICs.
Monitoring esxtop does not guarantee the traffic across all the physical NICs from a single VM; it has
to be forced. Take advantage of the vSwitch NIC Teaming so that each port group is configured to
use a single NIC, enabling alternate NICs to be used only for failover.
5. Select one of the iSCSI Guest port groups and click the Edit icon.