6.5

Table Of Contents
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Independent hardware iSCSI adapter - Leverages its own iSCSI management and conguration
interfaces.
See the vSphere Storage documentation for details on setup and failover scenarios.
You must congure iSCSI initiators for the host to access and display iSCSI storage devices.
Figure 5-1 depicts hosts that use dierent types of iSCSI initiators.
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The host on the left uses an independent hardware iSCSI adapter to connect to the iSCSI storage system.
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The host on the right uses software iSCSI.
Dependent hardware iSCSI can be implemented in dierent ways and is not shown. iSCSI storage devices
from the storage system become available to the host. You can access the storage devices and create VMFS
datastores for your storage needs.
Figure 51. iSCSI Storage
iSCSI storage
SP
IP network
HBA2 HBA1
NIC2
software
adapter
NIC1
Host 1
Host 2
hardware
iSCSI
software
iSCSI
Discovery Sessions
A discovery session is part of the iSCSI protocol. The discovery session returns the set of targets that you can
access on an iSCSI storage system.
ESXi systems support dynamic and static discovery.
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Dynamic discovery - Also known as Send Targets discovery. Each time the ESXi host contacts a
specied iSCSI storage server, it sends a Send Targets request to the server. In response, the iSCSI
storage server supplies a list of available targets to the ESXi host. Monitor and manage with esxcli
iscsi adapter discovery sendtarget or vicfg-iscsi commands.
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Static discovery - The ESXi host does not have to perform discovery. Instead, the ESXi host uses the IP
addresses or domain names and iSCSI target names, IQN or EUI format names, to communicate with
the iSCSI target. Monitor and manage with esxcli iscsi adapter discovery statictarget or vicfg-
iscsi commands.
For either case, you set up target discovery addresses so that the initiator can determine which storage
resource on the network is available for access. You can do this setup with dynamic discovery or static
discovery. With dynamic discovery, all targets associated with an IP address or host name and the iSCSI
name are discovered. With static discovery, you must specify the IP address or host name and the iSCSI
name of the target you want to access. The iSCSI HBA must be in the same VLAN as both ports of the iSCSI
array.
vSphere Command-Line Interface Concepts and Examples
70 VMware, Inc.