Adding a controller with VSC 4 goes to wrong datacenter

[peter1965]

Hello -

Using ESXI 4.1 with vcenter 5 with the VSC version 4.0 installed on it. I wanted to add a 6210 SAN controller to vcenter to mount datastores from it and notice that it always selects the wrong virtual datacenter.cluster. We use one vcenter for several geographical virtual environments. Example in the discovery in the tasks it would show that the controller was added but its was to the wrong datacenter versus the one I want it to go to.. How can we control what datacenter within vcenter we can add the controller to using VSC 4.0

thanks

[tdeepak]

Hi Peter, to clarify

VSC is context sensitive to the datacenter selection. For example you have 3 datacenters A,B,C.

If you were to select datacenter A in vCenter and then go to the VSC Overview panel, you would only see controllers that are associated(have storage mapped to) with ESX hosts in datacenter A. Similar behavior on selecting B and C.

If A , B and C are datacenters under a common folder and if you were to select that folder in vCenter and then go to the VSC Overview panel you would see all the controllers associated with ESX Hosts in datacenters A,B and C.

When you mentioned that the "controller was added but its was to the wrong datacenter" , it's most likely because  the controller has storage mapped to hosts in that "wrong datacenter" and that's why it showed up there. Can you double check to make sure that the added controller has no storage mapped to any ESX hosts in the "wrong datacenter"

[hdlondon11]

Hello, do you use the same private non-routable IP's between your ESXi servers and your NetApp controllers at each site for things like NFS or iSCSI?  If so, that is your problem.  The VSC will add the first set of NetApp controllers which would be in datacenter X.  After that, when you try to add another NetApp controller, that has the same private IP address, it thinks it is the same datacenter as the first.  This also causes the backups not to work because of the cookie cutter private IPs.  So even though the duplicate IPs cause no issue with VMware and how the VMs work, and help in keeping each site the same for documentation, you can't do it if you wish to use VSC options.