vSphere5: Remove iSCSI Target from shell

December 13, 2011 1 Comment

Today I had a little time to improve my vSphere Lab and I started by upgrading the iSCSI Storage (Openfiler).
I migrated all my VM’s and then I shutdown the old iSCSI without removing the iSCSI targets for ESXi. It turned out that this was a big mistake because one of the ESXi server become unresponsive.
The only way I was able to connect to the ESXi server was by acessing the troubleshooting console.
After searching the logs for clues it was obvious that I had to remove the iSCSI target from cli.

Anyway, first I wanted to see how does the ESXi sees this lost device/path and used the esxcfg-scsidevs command:

~ # esxcfg-scsidevs -l
t10.F405E46494C45400C4F4143537E4D22476F453D297361423
Device Type: Direct-Access
Size: 133216 MB
Multipath Plugin: NMP
Vendor: OPNFILER Model: VIRTUAL-DISK Revis: 0
SCSI Level: 4 Is Pseudo: false Status: dead
Is RDM Capable: true Is Removable: false
Is Local: false Is SSD: false

t10.F405E46494C45425362463E69485D254743613D2F6244655
Device Type: Direct-Access
Size: 400320 MB
Multipath Plugin: NMP
Vendor: OPNFILER Model: VIRTUAL-DISK Revis: 0
SCSI Level: 4 Is Pseudo: false Status: on
Is RDM Capable: true Is Removable: false
Is Local: false Is SSD: false

Then, to be able to remove the dead iSCSI connection I needed the name of the iSCSI target and this was very easy finding out using the vmkiscsi-tool command:

~ # vmkiscsi-tool -S vmhba32
STATIC DISCOVERY TARGET
NAME     : iqn.2006-01.com.openfiler:tsn.acf1f3fdb247
ADDRESS : 192.168.40.4:3260
BOOT     : No
LAST ERR : LOGIN: No Errors
STATIC DISCOVERY TARGET
NAME     : iqn.2006-01.com.openfiler:tsn.da6f7f008898
ADDRESS : 192.168.40.99:3260
BOOT     : No
LAST ERR : LOGIN: No Errors

Great, now I have everything I need to proceed! The following command helped remove the target:

~ # vmkiscsi-tool -S -r “192.168.40.4 iqn.2006-01.com.openfiler:tsn.acf1f3fdb247″ vmhba32

Then, I restarted the the Management agents and then checked to see if there were any errors in vmkernel.log reported.

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/sbin/services.sh restart
~ # tail -f /var/log/vmkernel.log
2011-12-12T12:24:13.208Z cpu3:2649)WARNING: NMP: nmpDeviceAttemptFailover:562:Retry world restore device "t10.F405E46494C45400C4F4143537E4D22476F453D297361423" - no more commands to retry
2011-12-12T12:24:17.674Z cpu1:2662)Tcpip: 2236: msleep returned 4
2011-12-12T12:24:22.678Z cpu1:2662)Tcpip: 2236: msleep returned 4
2011-12-12T12:24:22.741Z cpu1:2156)ScsiPath: 4963: DeletePath : adapter=vmhba32, channel=1, target=0, lun=0
2011-12-12T12:24:22.741Z cpu1:2159)ScsiPath: 4963: DeletePath : adapter=vmhba32, channel=0, target=0, lun=0
2011-12-12T12:24:22.741Z cpu3:2156)WARNING: ScsiPath: 5022: Remove path: vmhba32:C1:T0:L0
2011-12-12T12:24:22.741Z cpu1:2159)WARNING: NMP: nmpUnclaimPath:1577:Physical path "vmhba32:C0:T0:L0" is the last path to NMP device "Unregistered Device". The device has been unregistered.
2011-12-12T12:24:22.741Z cpu1:2159)WARNING: ScsiPath: 5022: Remove path: vmhba32:C0:T0:L0

After removing the target the ESXi server become responsive and I could connect to it using the vSphere Client.

PS: I know that removing the old iSCSI storage this way isn’t in the best practice papers, but this happened in my lab where everything is allowed.

Cheers