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Configure a volume and present the storage over iSCSSI

Hello everyone.

Welcome to another edition of how to my name is Richard Hornsby, one of the systems engineers for Nexsan. So in this, in this episode, I'm going to talk you through high level kind of view of configuring a volume and presenting that to a target server so you can present the storage over iSCSI.

Okay, so I've already done a few things in preparation. So if we just head to head to my Nexsan storage as we've got, this is an E 18.

Okay. So here I've configured the network already. I've got this controller zero configured on a dot 200 address. I've also configured host access in terms of over Ethernet on the iSCSI port. So I've got this dot 1.201, address, okay. I've also got a raid configured already, okay, so I've got a raid six bunch of disks already configured. So the only thing really left for me to do is to configure a volume and then present that to the server.

Okay, so here I'm going to click on Configure volumes. If you've got multiple disk arrays, they'll all kind of show here you just select the one that you you want and need. So here I've only got one available, so I'm just going to click on next, okay, so for the sake of this, I'm not going to do any I'm not going to reserve any space for snapshotting, and I'm going to just going to present the whole thing. The nice thing here is you can switch between units if you want to, okay, but I'm going to stick to gig, and then I'm just going to go ahead and click on create volume.

Now at this stage, I'm going to allocate this volume to a LUN or logical unit number. So here I'm going to go for lun zero. Okay. Also, what I would do here is, if you are creating multiple volumes, you may be better off first of all, clicking deny, just so that you don't present anything that you maybe don't want to to any of the any of the servers, but for this, because you can change that after the fact.

So here I'm just going to go ahead and give read write access for everything, just to make life a little bit easier. Okay, so I'm going to click on Apply Changes. It will just tell you that. Yeah, okay. You're going to set the kind of the default to read write, that's fine. We'll click on OK to that, and that's it. So the volume is created. We've got this bunch of storage that is available to us, and now we just need to present that to the server.

Now, what you'll notice is, if I just click on disk management here, for example, you know, there's no there's no extra storage been presented yet, and that's because we need to do an extra step. So first of all, we need to go to our I scuzzy. If I can type iSCSI initiator, which you'll see there, click on I scuzzy initiator, which is in the moment, is blank. But what we want to do is we want to tell this server about our Nexsan storage system. So I'm going to point that to 192 dot, 168, dot 1.201, that's the address that I configured. I'm going to click on Quick Connect, and it will present you with the IQN.

So that's a number that kind of associates to that storage array. Okay, so that's looking good. I'm just going to click on Done.

Now under here, if you click on Discovery, it will it, you know, it knows we're connected to 201, if you were to create any other kind of lungs or maps or anything like that, it would, it would appear here, and you can choose from it. So under favorite targets, I've only got the one volumes and disk. Of course, nothing's configured yet. So that's going to be blank. If you do have any RADIUS servers. This is where to configure that. Just add them in via this add button there and under Configuration, this is if you want to do something like maybe change that IQ and name, then absolutely, go ahead and do that. You can click on change.

But all we're really doing here is we're just saying, right, okay, this server, it can see that storage array, okay, via iSCSI, and there's the proof of that. So now, if we head over to our disk manager, there's the disk, there's the volume, okay, if that doesn't show what you can do is you can click on Action and just do re scan disks, and it should then show up. Okay. Then there's a few steps. You just right click. Now this is a bit of a pain. Actually, there's a difference between right clicking here and right clicking here.

So under this cave, you just right click, click on Online, then right click again, click on initialize disk, just select, OK, there. And then we need to actually allocate that or create a New Simple Volume. So right click on this section, New Simple Volume. Click through the wizard it's going to take you can, obviously, you can change the amount you actually want to provision. That's fine.

Click on Next. It's going to allocate the D drive. Click on next again, take the defaults. You can change these if you want to. It's up to you can change the volume name if you need to. But I'm just going to click on Next and Finish, and it will go. Away, and it will present that storage to the operating system, and there it is. So we very quickly configured a volume on the next an 18 series storage array. We've gone through the ice, cushy initiator process, and we've presented that to the operating system and created a brand new volume, and there is the storage for you to use.

Hopefully you found that useful.

Thank you very much.