ESX boot hangs at “restoring S/W iscsi volumes”
Posted by Chris on March 4, 2009
I ran into this problem last week after installing two new ESX hosts connected to via iSCSI to a Dell/Equallogic SAN.
After loading ESX and performing the iSCSI target configuration, I rebooted one of the hosts. The boot process hung at “restoring S/W iscsi volumes”. Eventually I became impatient and hit the power button only to have the same thing happen again after the hard reset.
This time I waited. After about ten minutes the host continued the boot process and everything was normal. Since I could see my iSCSI targets, I continued with the cluster configuration in VCenter, converted a physical machine to a virtual guest and encountered no other issues. Another reboot of one of the hosts revealed the problem still existed.
After parsing through /var/logs/vmware/vmkernel I found the following:
Feb 26 07:48:56 esx1 vmkernel: 0:00:04:54.761 cpu15:1089)<3>iSCSI: session 0xc203f90 login failed to authenticate with target iqn.2001-05.com.equallogic:6-8a0900-867555003-26300002be349a59-vss-control
During setup of the Equallogic, it will prompt for chap authentication credentials for the iSCSI targets. Normally, I limit access to the targets by ip address. However, the CHAP credentials are used for the vss-control iSCSI target.
If you have Windows hosts directly accessing the SAN, you need the vss-control target. In my case, ESX doesn’t require vss-control because all of my volumes are VMFS. Since VMware sees vss-control as a target it tries to connect to it.
There is a process you can go through to tell VMware not to attempt a connection to vss-control. The simpler method is to use the VI client to add CHAP credentials to the iSCSI software adapter. Click on Properties>Chap Authentication and enter the same CHAP user name and password that you input during the Equallogic setup process. After that change, the ESX boot process now takes about two minutes.
iSCSI Software Adapter Properties
mellerbeck said
I’m curious about your experience with the Dell/Equallogic SAN would you recommend it? Any pitfalls? Thanks a lot for any input we are close to pulling the trigger on one!
http://michaelellerbeck.com/category/vmware/
-Michael
Chris said
Our experience has been very good. We have been implementing Equallogic since before they were purchased by Dell. The support is excellent and they are continuing to evolve the product line at a rapid pace. We use Equallogic with VMware extensively. The project I’m wrapping up now involved virtualizing a data center consisting of over 60 physical servers on to nine Dell blades running ESX and using two PS5500′s for SAN storage. I honestly can’t think of any issues we’ve ran into implementing Equallogic. If you have any other questions drop me an email.
Chris said
Thanks for the message Anupama.
I failed my first attempt, missed a passing score by 32 points.
85 questions and a 90 minute time limit.
It’s not a difficult test. There were three key areas where I found my knowledge lacking, fibre channel storage, raw device mappings and resource pools. Had I been better prepared in those I would have passed.
Everything you need to know is in the exam blueprint and can be found in the Vsphere documentation pdf’s. My exam had questions from every section of the exam blueprint.
As part of my preparation for the second attempt, I’m reviewing the on-line training material for the VTSP (VMware Technical Sales Professional) available on VMware’s partner web site. It’s free and has helped fill in some of the gaps in my knowledge.