If you’re using an Equallogic PS series array for your vSphere storage, it is highly recommended to utilize the Equallogic MEM Plugin. Some of the benefits that your environment will reap are:

  • Easing iSCSI Setup
  • Increasing bandwidth
  • Reducing network latency
  • Automating load balancing across multiple active paths
  • Automating connection management
  • Automating failure detection and failover

The following is a walk-through of an example installation. For more details on the steps performed, please consult the Technical Report.

Pre-requisites:

  • ESX or ESXi >= 4.1 with Enterprise licensing
  • VMware vMA 4.01 or VMware CLI 4.1
  • Equallogic array firmware >= 4.3

The following utilizes the vMA to perform the installation. The vMA is an excellent tool, and in addition to help set this up, it can also be used as an excellent ESXi Syslog Server.

 

  1. Obtain the zip file containing the setup perl script and the package itself: https://www.equallogic.com/support/download_file.aspx?id=1101. You will need to SCP this over to your vMA server.
  2. Unzip the file which you scp’d over. Do NOT unzip the zip file inside, which is a VIB offline bundle.
  3. Place your host into maintenance mode.
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