Troubleshooting Installation of ESXi with iSCSI CHAP on UCS
In a nutshell, this does not work out of the box. It's not a pure issue - but here are the steps that I found to be able to install fresh using iSCSI with CHAP turned on and fix everything after the install. The alternative is if you don't use CHAP for the install, the install will work fine and you can setup CHAP afterwards in ESX and UCS and reboot using CHAP enabled.
Sure enough - ESX did not store the install parameters, such as the password given at install time and after configuring network from the console and setting the password again and logging in with the ESX client - you will see the datastore as offline (italic)
df from shell also fails
Login: root Permanently added '10.54.1.112' (RSA) to the list of known hosts. Password: X11 forwarding request failed on channel 0 The time and date of this login have been sent to the system logs. VMware offers supported, powerful system administration tools. Please see www.vmware.com/go/sysadmintools for details. The ESXi Shell can be disabled by an administrative user. See the vSphere Security documentation for more information. ~ # df Traceback (most recent call last): File "/bin/df", line 101, in <module> exit(main(sys.argv)) File "/bin/df", line 55, in main o = eval(output) File "<string>", line 1 Errors: ^ SyntaxError: invalid syntax
It looks like the install did not pass over the most of the CHAP/network parameters
After manually configuring networking
Then binding these to the iscsi storage adapter - previously it was not bound to *any* NICS
We see the paths properly (non-italicized)
df now works
~ # df Filesystem Bytes Used Available Use% Mounted on VMFS-5 13421772800 935329792 12486443008 7% /vmfs/volumes/datastore1 vfat 4293591040 3014656 4290576384 0% /vmfs/volumes/546b7cb5-0d20f330-e7bb-0025b50a000f vfat 299712512 201981952 97730560 67% /vmfs/volumes/546b7cab-777d9f90-34c0-0025b50a000f vfat 261853184 166678528 95174656 64% /vmfs/volumes/878d7f71-8afc4912-dfa6-e3a08336a4f3 vfat 261853184 8192 261844992 0% /vmfs/volumes/36ce7a71-2dfd45ca-9fde-5c60008cac18
SSH into the ESXi host and run auto-backup.sh - *important* this is to save the new config to bootbank - it's currently only in memory then reboot
configuration has persisted over the reboot.