In another post, we’ve already got the basic setup of the SAN completed, now we just need to finish a few things and then provision some storage.
First let’s get the firmware updated. If’ you’ve not already configured an account with EqualLogic, do so now by going to http://support.equallogic.com and signing up.
Once you’ve downloaded the firmware we’ll update it by following these steps:
- Login to the management group ip of your device, expand “Members” in the left hand pane.
- Highlight the unit, and then click on the “Maintenance” tab.
- Click “Update firmware….”, Enter the admin password, and then click “OK”.
- Navigate and point to the .tgz file that you’ve downloaded from EqualLogic, and then press “OK”
- In the “Action” column click the link to upgrade and follow the steps to upgrade and reboot.
We’ll now configure some email alerting, Log back into your management group IP and perform the following:
- Click the “Notifications” tab.
- Check the box labeled “Send e-mail to addresses”.
- In the “E-mail recipients” window, click “Add” and enter the email address you’d like to receive alert emails.
- in the “SMTP Servers” window click “Add”, and enter the IP address of your SMTP server.
- Check the box labeled “Send e-mail alerts to customer support( E-Mail Home)”.
- Enter a reply email address so that customer support can return an email to you in the event that the SAN reports a hardware failure.
- Enter the email address you want the SAN to use when it sends out emails in the box labeled “Sender e-mail address”.
That’s it for notifications, now let’s configure our first volume that we’ll make available to our ESXi hosts. Follow these steps:
- First expand “Storage Pools” in the left pane, and then click on the “Default” Storage Pool.
- Click on “Create Volume”, Give the volume a name and description and then click “Next >”.
- Give the volume a size, it’s important to remember that ESXi has a limit of 2TB -512B for a LUN size, so for simplicty, don’t make the volume larger than 2047GB. Uncheck “thin provisioned volume” unless you want it to be thinly provisioned. If you are planning on using snapshots, leave this at 100%, otherwise if you are going to be backing up the SAN without using snapshots, change this to 0% to conserve storage space. Click “Next >”.
- Click “No access” for now, we’ll add access later. “Access Type” should be set to “read-write” and the box for “allow simultaneous connections from initiators with different IQN names” should be checked. Click “Next >”.
- Click “Finish”.
- Highlight the newly created volume, and then click the “Access” tab.
- Click “Add”, Check the box labeled “Limit access by IP address”, Enter the IP address of the first ESXi server (use the IP address for the nic team on the LAG we created for iSCSI in this post). Click “OK”.
- Repeat steps 6 & 7 for each of your ESXi hosts.
That’s it. We’ve got our SAN configured, at least enough to get vCenter installed and running properly. Time to get vCenter installed.
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