Help setting up Dell MD3000i SAN

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Hi, From some of my other posts on here we’ve been working towards replacing a lot of our old kit and sliming down into a virtualised environment.

So we’ve got a Dell 1950 and a Dell MD3000i iSCSI SAN

The 1950 is running Server 2008 core and has four server 2008 virtual machines running inside it.

On the MD3000i we’ve set up two virtual disks, one 4 disk RAID5 virtual disk and one 4 disk RAID10 virtual disk.

The next part is where it gets complicated to explain.

We can create virtual groups for each virtual disk; each virtual group allows an iSCSI initiator to connect from one of the servers and access the raw disks in that RAID setup.

This part is fine, two of the severs both need to talk to the same RAID10 virtual group and that works fine. I can see the virtual disk in each of the servers disk manager and have created two partitions for them to access.

The problem is one of the servers need access to both virtual groups (the RAID5 and RAID10 virtual disks).

It would seem that each virtual disk can only be assigned to a single virtual group.
If we create two virtual groups we cannot assign the same iSCSI initiator from a server to each individual group as it complains saying the iqn is already in use.

I’ve added a picture of the two setups we have tried so far without success

Is it even possible to do what we are trying to do?
dellmd3000isetupic1.jpg
 
First Question !

Are you running widows (server 2003 etc) or one of the Virtual technologies (VMware ESX / Citrix XenServer) on the PE 2950 ?
 
thanks for the link, its been helpful.

managed to get the disks shared out as we wanted, but performance seems really off

we're only getting 55MB/s from a RAID 10 volume, but I think thats got something to do with the VM running inside Hyper-V :(
 
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