ESXi iSCSI initiator and data store

At this point I have an ESXi hypervisor, which is hosting a few important virtual machines from a SSD drive. That is, a Windows 2003 AD server, and Solaris 11 NAS server. NAS server has 4 large drives passed through to it. Solaris 11 organizes these 4 drives into RAID-Z (Stripped, 1 parity disk) ZFS pool. From this pool, NAS server caters to the windows and UNIX clients on the network. I also created an iSCSI target ( or LUN) in the pool, of 500GB.

Now I want to make this LUN available on the ESXi hypervisor itself. ESXi will create a data store on the LUN, where other virtual machines will be stored. Those won't be the machines that are always on, like AD server or NAS server. They will be my lab machines.

In the future I will be able to 'mount' this LUN from another ESXi host, should I need more resources to run these machines. But for now, all iSCSI network traffic will be on the virtual network inside the ESXi host. I want to make the setup simple and inexpensive, so there won't be hardware iSCSI adapters or dedicated network cards or any security between iSCSI initiator (ESXi) and target ( Solaris NAS )

This makes any ESXi networking configuration unnecessary - I will just use the  management network already configured at the installation time.

1. Log in to the vSphere Client, and select a server from the inventory panel.
2. Click the Configuration tab and click Storage Adapters in the Hardware panel.The list of available storage adapters appears.
3. Select the iSCSI initiator to configure and click Properties.
4. Click Configure.
5. To enable the initiator, select Enabled and click OK.

Add static target. I use the IP address of the Solaris 11 NAS virtual machine and the target ID created for me (see the previous post). I use no authentication.

ESXi will offer a rescan, and new LUN shows up

Create new data store on the iSCSI LUN