VMware iSCSI multipath (Round Robin) for Equallogic

Update: tag all Round Robin LUNs in one script

Updated for vSphere5

Update: See Part 2 which covers the Dell script to do this for you.

This post stands as my cheatsheet for the information found here regarding best practices to configure VMware to connect via iSCSI to an Equallogic SAN.

If you’re using ESXi, enable Remote support either on the console or by starting the process from the vSphere client.  Connect to the host using an SSH client like putty

Create a new switch
esxcfg-vswitch -a vSwitch1

Add Jumbo capabilities to the new switch
esxcfg-vswitch -m 9000 vSwitch1

verify the NICs to use then add the nics to the new switch
esxcfg-vswitch -L vmnic1 vSwitch1
esxcfg-vswitch -L vmnic6 vSwitch1

enable iSCSI using the GUI (this can be done anytime before this step)
get two IP addresses on the iSCSI network for your two VMKernel ports

Add a VMKernel port to the switch and enable jumbo frames
esxcfg-vswitch -A ISCSI vSwitch1
esxcfg-vmknic -a -i  10.1.3.21 -n 255.255.0.0 -m 9000 ISCSI
esxcfg-vswitch -A ISCSI2 vSwitch1
esxcfg-vmknic -a -i  10.1.3.121 -n 255.255.0.0 -m 9000 ISCSI2

Set second NIC to unused using the GUI:  Select one iSCSI vmkernel and edit its network failover setting to one NIC active, the other unused.  Set the other iSCSI kernel the opposite.

Check vmk? for NICs then add vmknics to iscsi initiator (Use “esxcfg-vmknic -l” to list all VMKernel NICs and verify which vmknic is which).
Check the GUI to see which vmhba# was assigned to iSCSI

esxcli swiscsi nic add -n vmk0 -d vmhba33
esxcli swiscsi nic add -n vmk1 -d vmhba33

Add storage

For each LUN set path to Round Robin using the GUI