Network Attached Storage​

NFS v3 is the NAS bread-and-butter protocol as it is FPGA accelerated whilst the iSCSI target driver is not; the V2I dashboard plugin also checks to ensure the mount point is NFS based. Also, placing a block device such as iSCSI on top of a NAS(whilst 100% supported) to access the iSCSI LU residing under the NAS adds extra overhead. You must consider the added latency when attempting to do such a configuration. Whilst technically feasible, your best option for using iSCSI with VMware with HitachiVantara storage is to use the all-block solution. There are many NAS customers happily using NFS v3 with the NAS solution.

Thanks Al.

Just cause you could, doesn't mean you should, I get it.

and I'm not say'n I deployed it, but it did end up in my lap.... 

You mentioned "(whilst 100% supported)" is this a general statement to iSCSI on HNAS or more specifically VMware > iSCSI > HNAS as the doc on the partner portal doesn't

iSCSI is fully supported on HNAS.  We will also support iSCSI with VMware initiators, but we would prefer customers to use NFS with VMware as it gives a better experience and better performance.

>>and I'm not say'n I deployed it, but it did end up in my lap....

Is that to say, it has deployed, but you were not the one to do the deployment?

can you mail message me privately with the customer name and email a set of diagnostics from the system (gather from the SMU) so we can have record in our internal portal?

Hi John,

not sure you are aware that you can use iSCSI on VSP G array "block controller", without HNAS module.

You can add 4x 10Gbps LAN port increments in the VSP G "block controller" for storage capacity consumption via iSCSI.

Kind Regards,

Marin

That's true, but there is no simple way of migrating existing iSCSI LUs from the NAS module to the block controller iSCSI.  The only option would be to create a new VMware datastore using a block controller iSCSI LU as the target, and then tell VMware to migrate (copy) all the data.