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Troubleshooting Installation of ESXi with iSCSI CHAP on UCS

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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.

 1.png

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)

3.png

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

 4.png

After manually configuring networking 5.png

Then binding these to the iscsi storage adapter - previously it was not bound to *any* NICS

 6.png

We see the paths properly (non-italicized) 

7.png

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

8.png

configuration has persisted over the reboot.