5- Creating Your Own Vmware Virtual Environment - DS5100 Storage Configuration Part1

I assume you have already powered on your storage device, if not first Turn on Storage Expansions and wait for 3 minutes Then turn on storage controller.

Download the Storage Manager Software from the vendor’s support web site and install it on your a computer.

Select Management Station option

If you are installing this management software on a server which runs 24/7, you probably want to select the first option (Automatically Start Monitor). This will allow you send notification to the system admins about the possible problems about your storage. I select the second option, because I will just configure the storage from my laptop.

After you install the software, right click "Discovered Storage Subsystem" and select "Add Storage Subsystem".

Enter the management ip addresses for our storage controllers

Now right click on our storage and select Manage Storage Subsystem

If you want to change your management network ip addresses, you should navigate to Setup > Configure Ethernet Management Ports.

1- Create Host Group for ESX servers:

We need to define the ESX Host WWN which are allowed to have access to our storage unit. To be able to do that, we need to know the WWN addresses of the HBA cards on our ESX Hosts. First enable SSH on your ESXi server. Log on to ESXi host > Troubleshooting Options > Enable SSH. Then use Putty and connect to your ESXi host and run the following command. This command will show your HBA WWNs.

esxcli storage core adapter list  

We can see HBA name and also UID (WWN).  By looking at these information, we can create host groups on our storage

 Navigate to Host Mappings Tab > Right Click Default Group> Define > Host

 Enter a name for this host

By using the esxcli command above I know what WWNs are used for IBMESX01 host. Select the WWN, add an alias for each WWN and click Next

Select VMWARE for Host Type (Operating System)

In the following screen, it is basically asking if this is the only host or is there a group of hosts that will access to our storage

Because we have not created a host group, it is asking to create one now.

Wizard Created a Host Group and our first host in that group. Now Select Yes and add the other 2 hosts into our Host Group named IBMESXHosts. 

When you are adding the other hosts, you should select Existing Host Group. Because we already created the host group for our hosts.

We created Host Group and its members

To prevent this article to be too long I think I am gonna create another part for storage configuration.

In Part6 we will create Disk Arrays and LUNs.