iSCI conneciton lost after ESXi 5.1 upgrade

[LowBoost]

As the title implies, I have upgraded my vCenter and hosts to ESXi 5.1
Everything went smooth without errors. After the hosts restarted, I noticed no datastores are connected.
I re-scanned HBAs, and verified all settings were not changed by the upgrade.

It will not detect the target at all.

[Anatoly (staff)]

Is everything is pingable? I mean can you ping ESX and Starwind hosts?

[tchuyev]

Hi, I'm using StarWind iSCSI Server 6.0 Build 4768... and since I've upgraded my ESXi 5.0 to 5.1, iSCSI datastore connections are very unstable.
Network interfaces are part of the VMware HCL : Intel I350-T4. These are dedicated to network iSCSI storage.
Pings are OK between the ESXi 5.1 server and the StarWind target, no problem.
I've checked both system and network settings, as well as switch configuration, without success.

To be more accurate, issues encountered are:
> Takes between 17 seconds to 5 minutes to present iSCSI datastore(s) when adding new storage from vSphere Client
> Takes 5 minutes to copy a 3Gb file from local ESXi datastore to iSCSI LUN (whereas it took 45 seconds before!)
> iSCSI connectivity always remain permanent between the ESXi host and the StarWind server but sometimes, I can't delete a file from the iSCSI datastore when browsing through the vSphere Client

I'll try to downgrade to ESXi 5.0 and see if those problems persist.

[Anatoly (staff)]

OK, we will wait for your update then.

Please keep us informed - this is really important for us.

Thank you

[tchuyev]

I did some extensive tests over the w/e... as I couldn't determine what the problem was.
Downgraded to ESXi 5.0 without success, then tried to go back to StarWind 5.8 Build 2059 : still no luck!

Eventually, I found the answer: you absolutely MUST set a target name (in addition to the target alias), when creating a new one.
StarWind Management Console is allowing you to proceed without, which is causing unpredictable results.
I know that may sound obvious, but that's a fact.

So I was then able to have all hypervisor/iSCSI target combinations up and running with normal performance results.
ESXi 5.1 and ESX 5.0 are running fine with either StarWind 5.8 & 6.0

BTW, just noticed hardware acceleration is supported on StarWind 6.0 Build 4768: is this a new VAAI kind-of-feature?

[Anatoly (staff)]

Well, that is weird. May I ask you what device type was used?

About VAAI: this will be supported in our next release.