I know that Dell's official stance on MD3000i and ESXi 5.1 is "not-supported", but I have it running successfully in several locations; all of which started life as ESXi 4.x host servers and were "upgraded" to ESXi 5.1.
My problem is with an entirely new install of ESXi 5.1 attempting to connect to and communicate with an MD3000i SAN running the latest DELL firmware.
To make a long story short, When I initially configured the iSCSI Adapter and vSwitch/VMkernel ports using (2) of the existing (4) ports on a DELL R710 server, I was able to communicate with the MD3000i. However, the client wanted to add an Intel (4) port NIC and use (1) ports from that nic and (1) from the built in Broadcom adapter for a bit of extra redundancy. So I removed (1) of the iSCSI ports bound to the iSCSI adapter, removed it from the vSwitch and recreated it using a vmnic from the new Intel card. After binding the new vmkernel port to the iSCSI adapter, I re-scanned and lost all communications with the MD3000i.
Numerous reconfigurations later, including completely removing/rebuilding the iSCSI binding, vSwitch/vmkernel ports and the host topology on the MD3000i, I am still unable to communicate with the MD3000i.
Does anyone have any ideas what I might be missing here? I'm baffled why it was working seemingly fine for a brief period of time and now won't work at all after what should have been a very simple modification.
If it helps, it seems as thought the host is unable to communicate with the MD3000i at all, since a Dynamic discovery returns no static discovery list and there are no iSCSI sessions showing up on the MD3000i.