I’m currently dealing with a problem on several of our ESX IBM LS21 Blades when trying to attach to ISCSI Luns on the Netapp FAS 3020’s.  Our Netapp currently connects to two separate physical networks to deliver ISCSI connectivity. The ESX support folks are telling us that the netapp presents both ISCSI interfaces to the server.  Initially the ESX box connects on the correct interface, but then after a few hours it attempts to try the other IP address and fails and disconnects the entire VM Host from the Netapp, despite the fact that the network never went down. We have several Windows 2003 servers with ISCSI initiator that don’t have this problem on identical hardware and chassis.

 

I assume that either ESX’s iscsi initiator is badly designed, or MS has broken some industry standard spec.  To rearchitect our storage network will take significant investment on our part, and we’d rather come up with a way to fix this either by pushing on ESX to fix the initiator or finding a way to have the Netapp only send one IP address back to the initiator. Is there any way to resolve this from the Netapp perspective?

 

Thanks in advance.

 

 

-Justin