How to get ESX MPIO working on StardWind iSCSI SAN
Anton (CTO of Starwind) gave me a great gift last night (StarWind v5.6 Ent), thanks! I couldn’t wait to set it up and do some tests on this latest toy!
The setup is very easy, took me less than 5 mins, probably I’ve installed the previous v4.x back in 2009, but setup according to my own taste is a bit tricky as you need to tweak starwind.cfg and understand the first few parameters especially under the <Connection> section.
It took me 1 hours to get everything working (ie, ESX MPIO+Starwind) as I want to limit the NICs to only iSCSI subnet, as well as change the default iSCSI port to 3268. Yes, sure you can use a non-default port as 3268, as my 3260 is occupied by Microsoft’s iSCSI Target 3.3. I found the default installation also opens the management and iSCSI port 3261/3260 to public in firewall, you definitely want to disable it and limit the NIC access in StarWind management console as well the .cfg file.
So I have configured two Gbit NICs on WindStar box,
10.0.8.2:3268
10.0.8.3:3268
On each of the ESX Host there are 4 Gbit NICs on iSCSI subnet, I added one of the target IP 10.0.8.2:3268, then I found ONLY 4 MPIO Paths discovered, but not the 8 paths, all 4 were using the 10.0.8.2 path, this mean the other redundant path 10.0.8.3:3268 was not being used at all, so MPIO was not working technically specking. On contrast, Microsoft iSCSI Target will add the other one 10.0.8.3:3268 automatically, so it correctly shows 8 Paths.
After searching Starwind forum with Google (yes, use that site: command, so powerful), I quickly located the problem is within starwind.cfg
You can do normal ESX multipathing in Starwind without the HA cluster feature of Starwind 5, just follow the instructions for configuring Starwind to work with XEN and uncomment the <iScsiDiscoveryListInterfaces value=”1″/> line in the starwind.cfg file. This allows ESX to see all the possible paths to the iSCSI target on the server.
After enabled it, and restarted the StarWind service, Bingo! Everything worked as expected! 8 MPIO paths showing Active (I/O). This tweak does work for ESX as well not just Xen, and in fact it’s a MUST to enable it in order to see all paths.
So within the last 3 days, I was able to added two software iSCSI SAN to my VMware environment together with Equallogic, now I virtually have three SANs to play with, I will try to test Storage vMotion between all 3 SANs and perform some interesting benchmarking on StarWind as well as Microsoft iSCSI Target.
Later, I will try to configure the StarWind HA mode on VM (which is hosted on Equallogic), so it’s an iSCSI SAN within another iSCSI SAN. 
Well… It’s too bad Ferrari does not give away Italia 458 free of charge b/c you plan to use it for non-production only
Good job!
Thank you!
Anton
Hi Anton,
Thanks for the Ferrari:)…btw, regarding the idea of an iSCSI SAN within another iSCSI SAN, this is exactly something like the movie Matrix or Inception, you will never know if you are within your own dream or not, something extraordinary popped up in my mind this morning when I woke up, so I came up with the following extreme case just for fun.
First deploy a W2K8R2 VM on the default EQL VMFS, then install Microsoft iSCSI Target on top of it and put the SAN vNIC into the same iSCSI SAN as EQL (or the default iSCSI subnet), then create another W2K8R2 VM on this MS iSCSI VMFS and then install StarWind on top, also put the SAN vNIC into the same iSCSI subnet, then use the first W2K8R2 VM (which hosted on EQL) to connect to Starwind SAN again…you can continue to do as many iterations as you want, wow…you see how this is working? Ha…it’s A LOOP!
Honestly speaking your idea is not that crazy as it could look from the very first look
You can indeed have multiple SANs sticking around your data centre basement. They are working but lack some features (HA, replication, de-duplication etc). You can indeed use other SAN software and aggregate all these SANs into single HA device with replication and de-duplication. It’s called *storage virtualization*. Easy to manage, ROI is huge. FYI.
Anton
Hello,
I’m in the same boat as yours:) I have HP DL 380 running Windows 2003 SP1 plain without any further updates.
I configured hp Teaming on it to get 2 Gbps NICs. Then, I installed Starwind on it and present it the target LUN to the ESX 4.1 servers that running on Dell 2850.
I then, configured iSCSI Mutipathing on the ESX with Jumbo Frame where each vSwitch1 have two outbound adapters, after that I have override the vSwitch nic teaming to split each iSCSI portgroup to have direct vmnic and those iSCSI kernels configured with Jumbo Frame as well.
I ended up seeing two paths from one StarWind iSCSI Target and then I changed the iSCSI LUN to be a Round Robin.
Here’s a Disk Benchmarking on one VM running on the StarWind iSCSI LUN http://www.starwindsoftware.com/forums/starwind-f5/performance-with-esx-mutipathing-okay-t2456.html
Anton suggested to configure the MPIO where I don’t see any clean document to do that between StarWind running on Windows and VMware ESX. Any idea?
Search MPIO Starwind in Google, I’ve seen it somewhere in a PDF, Starwind and ESX probably.
Btw, I wouldn’t use NIC Teaming if I were you, MPIO means no Teaming and still able to load-balance between the two paths or NICs.
Anyway, Starwind was made FREE last week! That’s a great news for many, I mean probably millions who are looking for a software iSCSI SAN besides Microsoft iSCSI Target or Linux based ones.