If you don’t have a fancy physical iSCSI target in your lab but still want to do some testing with the esxcli command, Starwind software offers a great iSCSI alternative with their StarWind iSCSI SAN software. It can be used as shared storage for almost any application, it is fully compatible for use with VMware.
After you have created a StarWind iSCSI target, it’s ready to service connections. You can established a connection to an iSCSI target and it appears as a new datastore on your ESX server. I’ll show the operations you need to complete to create and format the datastore in the way your ESX server can create virtual machines on it.
I’m also going to show how the esxcli command can be used for PSA (pluggable storage architecture) management and explain how to use the vSphere Client to manage the PSA, the associated native multipathing plug‐in (NMP).
In this online training we’re going to take a look at the multi pathing policy, in this particular case we’re using round robin. For this setup, because multipathing plugins do not have direct access to physical NICs on your host, you first need to connect each physical NIC to a separate VMkernel port. You then associate all VMkernel ports with the software iSCSI initiator using a port binding technique. As a result, each VMkernel port connected to a separate NIC becomes a different path that the iSCSI storage stack.
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/iscsi-san-for-microsoft-windows-multipathing
http://www.starwindsoftware.com/download-free-trial
