Last night I installed the latest NexentaStor Community Edition (5.2.1) and tried to create an iSCSI target then added it to some ESXi nodes to build my home lab environment.
At the beginning I though I could finish such things in a short time but finally it took me more than half day. 
The installation was easy and I just selected some options as below:
- 27 for the keyboard language
- Select 'Manual installation'
- Select root disk ( I had two disks, so just selected the local one and left the other for shared datastore)
- Assign the Computer Name and the Static IP address
- Select 'default' storage profile
- Select timezone
- Do not run ntp client
- Input admin user's password
- Input Replication password
- Begin installation
Then I tried to manage the system with web interface but failed. Yes, from version 5, have to manage it using console in Community Edition.
Although I was not afraid of shell interface I still did not feel comfortable as it was the first time I touched such NAS system.
First had to enable NAT NIC to access the internet and activate it:
- ip create static e1000g0/v4 192.168.126.102/24 (for NAT network)
- route create default 192.168.126.2
- route destroy default 192.168.116.1 (remove the host-only default gateway)
- license activate 83428764-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
- license show
Below steps were to create one simple volume and map it to a iSCSI target group for lab test.
- CLI@iscsi> disk list
- # NAME LABEL SIZE MEDIATYPE SED STATE WHERE USAGE
- 1 c3t0d0 - 17.18GB ssd no ONLINE LEGACY_SAS:1 rpool (active)
- 2 c3t1d0 - 64.42GB ssd no ONLINE LEGACY_SAS:2 -
- CLI@iscsi> pool create sharedstore c3t1d0
- CLI@iscsi> disk list
- # NAME LABEL SIZE MEDIATYPE SED STATE WHERE USAGE
- 1 c3t0d0 - 17.18GB ssd no ONLINE LEGACY_SAS:1 rpool (active)
- 2 c3t1d0 - 64.42GB ssd no ONLINE LEGACY_SAS:2 sharedstore (active)
- CLI@iscsi> iscsitarget create -n iqn.2005-07.com.nexenta:internal 192.168.116.102
- New target 'iqn.2005-07.com.nexenta:internal' has been created
- CLI@iscsi> iscsitarget create -n iqn.2005-07.com.nexenta:external 192.168.126.102
- New target 'iqn.2005-07.com.nexenta:external' has been created
- CLI@iscsi> iscsitarget list
- NAME PORTALS AUTH STATE
- external 192.168.126.102:3260 default online
- internal 192.168.116.102:3260 default online
- CLI@iscsi> vg create sharedstore/nexenta
- CLI@iscsi> vol create sharedstore/nexenta/vol1 55G
- CLI@iscsi> targetgroup create tg1 internal external
- CLI@iscsi> targetgroup list
- NAME MEMBERS
- tg1 internal,external
- CLI@iscsi> lunmapping create sharedstore/nexenta/vol1 tg1 all
- CLI@iscsi> lunmapping list
- ID VOLUME TARGETGROUP HOSTGROUP LUN
- 67186C84E0E95E8C00000000 sharedstore/nexenta/vol1 tg1 all 0
- CLI@iscsi> iscsitarget list
- NAME PORTALS AUTH STATE
- external 192.168.126.102:3260 default online
- internal 192.168.116.102:3260 default online
Note: some documents said '-b 4096' should be used when creating the lunmapping, while if I added the option '-b 4096' then the ESXi would never found the iSCSI lun.
I failed here more than one day!
On the ESXi side, it was really simple and there were many posts about how to configure iSCSI devices on ESXi.
