Install Guide

17 Best Practices for Sharing an iSCSI SAN Infrastructure with Dell PS Series and SC Series Storage using VMware vSphere

Hosts | 2015-A-BP-INF

5 Enabling vSphere 6.5 host access to PS Series and SC

Series iSCSI storage – dedicated

This section assumes the environment is historically a PS Series storage environment and SC Series storage

with new hosts dedicated to the SC Series storage is being introduced into the environment, where only the

iSCSI SAN infrastructure is being shared, as shown in section 3.2

5.1 Configure access to PS Series storage

This section covers configuring access to PS Series storage through the installation and assumes VMware

licensing is Enterprise or Enterprise Plus and supports the use of MEM.

5.1.1 PS Series Multipathing Extension Module (MEM) for VMware

The VMware vSphere host servers were configured using the best practices defined in the Dell PS Series

Configuration Guide, including the installation of MEM on the vSphere host servers.

For more information on MEM, see Configuring and Installing the PS Series Multipathing Extension Module

for VMware vSphere and PS Series SANs.

Note: MEM is only supported when using VMware vSphere Standard or above licensing.

After preparing the vSphere host, map volumes using Dell Storage Manager or Group Manager.

Note: See the PS Series Group Administration Guide for information on creating volumes and mapping

volumes to hosts (requires a login account).

5.2 Configure access to SC Series storage

This section covers configuring vSphere hosts to access SC Series storage when those hosts have not been

configured to access any other storage platform.

Note: If the hosts being configured have already been configured to access PS Series storage, go back to

section 4.

5.2.1 Configuring the VMware iSCSI software initiator to access SC Series volumes

The first step to configure the vSphere hosts for SC Series arrays using a single subnet and iSCSI port

binding is to create VMkernel (vmk) ports. For port binding to work correctly, the initiator must be able to

reach the target. With the release of vSphere 6.5, routing is supported when using port binding. However,

prior to vSphere 6.5, iSCSI port binding did not support routing: requiring the initiator and target to be in the

same subnet. VMware requires each VMkernel port used for iSCSI port binding to be associated with a single

vmnic uplink.