Hello Group,
The issue I am trying to overcome is the following. We have 700 VM's across 7 Equallogic arrays in two pools with 70+ in-guest iSCSI connections. We would like to convert these guest based iscsi volumes into vmdk's. The issue we are facing is the connection count against our Equallogic pools. As many know, there is a 1024 connection limit / pool. We have numerous hosts connecting to these different pools and with Equallogic MEM installed this doubles and or triples the connections for each volume by each host who has access to it.
I know that I can manually limit the connection count on each volume but this appears to be done at each server. Doing this from each server for 70+ volumes would be at least 700 changes. So what I am wondering is if there is an automated method to handle this OR a different approach to take? I am hoping to move away from iSCSI or RDM for various reasons. Using RDM's, most monitoring software cannot distinguish the volume name, instead it supplies the naa: number for the volume making it very difficult to monitor. Secondly, we are planning on changing SAN vendors over the next few months which will make it much easier to move the data from SAN to SAN since the vmdk's will be transportable. Thirdly we are in the process of preparing our environment for SRM, which would also significantly simply the process by using vmdk's, ESPECIALLY if we end up having dissimilar SAN's in two locations.
Suggestions are welcome!