Working with an Iomega StorCenter ix2-200
I just got a 4 TB Iomega StorCenter ix2-200 for use with VMware. The idea is that we can send it to customer locations, copy backups/VMDKs on it, and then ship it back. Previously we had done this with USB drives, but connecting a USB drive to a server is often problematic.
Basic setup for VMware NFS datastores:
- Don’t enable security
- If you do, you have to work through enabling networks to see the individual shares
- Enable NFS under Protocols
- On the Shares page, under each share there is now a NFS item with the export name
When I was setting this up the first time I ran into some issues. Due to the posts and comments at http://www.krausam.de/?p=33, I was able to use SSH to get a better understanding of the configuration and review logs. To enable SSH,
- Go to http://IOMEGAURL/diagnostics.html (a hidden page)
- Under Support Access, click Allow remote access for support
- SSH to the device
- User: root
- Password: sohoadmin
- If you enabled security on the device, the password is soho + yourpassword
Problems making NFS work.
When trying to mount the NFS partition, my ESX server kept erroring out. The vmkernel log reported “WARNING: NFS: 946: MOUNT RPC failed with RPC status 13 (RPC was aborted due to timeout) trying to mount“. The logs on the Iomega showed the mount request was being authenticated, but the mount never succeeded.
A little more googling and I found http://fojta.wordpress.com/2011/01/16/iomega-vmware-esx-nfs-datastore-issue/. It turns out the Iomega attempts to resolve the DNS address of the requesting system. Normally this wouldnt be a problem, but I was on a network that didnt have access to a DNS server. Adding a hosts entry fixed the problem