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We are in the process of a network redesign and I am now down to changing the IP address of the Equallogic iSCSI SAN that is in use by our VMware ESX servers.

The Equallogic has three active ethernet ports servicing iSCSI requests.

I'm lookingfor a solution that will allow me to renumber the interfaces on the iSCSI SAN, and reconfigure the ESX servers to point to the new addresses, without any downtime.

has anyone preformed this sort of task before? Is what I am asking even possible?

Richard West
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2 Answers2

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Approximate steps would be:

  • Configure LUNs to be available on multiple NICs with multiple IPs on the SAN
  • Configure ESX hosts to see those LUNs via both IPs (MPIO)
  • Verify that the ESX hosts can flip across to the second SAN route with a test LUN + VM
  • Flip the traffic across for the production VMs, reconfigure the NIC that is now unused
  • Repeat for the other NICs as required

This process depends on your SAN, ESX and Switch capabilities being able to support a full MPIO configuration, and being configured appropriately.

Depending on your SAN model, this guide may be appropriate: http://www.federalappliance.com/fedapp_vmware_3.0.1_equallogic.pdf http://pubs.vmware.com/vsp40_i/wwhelp/wwhimpl/common/html/wwhelp.htm#href=iscsi_san_config/c_equallogic_storage_systems.html&single=true

After a bit more reading, some say ESX 3.5's software iSCSI initiator doesn't support MPIO, while ESX 4 does. We have MPIO implemented on ESX 3.5 over iSCSI with the Software initiator, for a Clariion unit... so YMMV.

Chris Thorpe
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I doubt that this will be possible with Equallogic, at least not without some downtime. The Equallogic architecture will allow you to change the ip-addresses of the interfaces without any downtime (provided the new addresses are visible to the old addresses) but the Group IP-address that is used for management and as the iSCSI target address cannot be changed without some downtime - once you change that you will lose connectivity to the entire set of arrays until you change the target settings on all of your ESX hosts and rescan. I would call Dell and ask them about this but I'd be surprised if it can be done unless they've added something new recently. If you do find out that it can be done, please let us know.

Helvick
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    After preforming the migration last week I can confirm that this can not be done without some down time -- kind of :-) You are correct that once the group IP address is changed then all ESX server will lose connectivity to the SAN. However, within each VM I have set the disk timeout to 120 seconds. This then gave me a two minute window to point the ESX servers to the new group IP address, and rescan. After the rescan connections were reestablished to the to new IP address and everything was OK. I was able to to 3 ESX servers in the 2 min. window, but it was tight. No VM crashed during this :-) – Richard West Dec 07 '09 at 17:20
  • That's an excellent piece of Sys Admin work under pressure. – Helvick Dec 07 '09 at 19:10