Choosing an iSCSI Device During EBS Installation

[Today's post comes to us courtesy of Kunal Ghotge and Mark Stanfill]

EBS setup disables all network cards except for the LAN NIC during installation (the Security Server will enable its external NIC during setup). Hence, a data volume on an iSCSI drive connected through a network card will not be accessible during the installation and setup will fail because it is unable to write to the drive.

During the installation process you will be prompted to choose a volume to store the data :

image

Note: The screen shots in this example are from the Management Server installation, but you will see similar errors for Security Server and Messaging Server.

If you plan to use external drives connected through iSCSI , the installation will go through the initial steps successfully , but will fail when it tries to write data on the external drive.

image

The only option at this stage is to cancel the setup and start the installation again.

The solution is to select the system partition or another attached hard drive (i.e. a non-iSCSI drive) as the data partition during the installation:image

image

Once the installation is complete, you can add the external drive through iSCSI and move data to that drive manually.

To move the data on the EBS servers you can use the steps outlined in this article:

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc940976.aspx

For instructions on how to restart a failed installation, please see this blog post:

https://blogs.technet.com/essentialbusinessserver/archive/2009/02/24/properly-handling-an-ebs-2008-setup-failure.aspx