[ale] Getting rid of VMware

[Tod Fassl]

Soonish, I am going  to have to take an ISCSI array that is currently 
talking to a VMWare virtual machine running Linux and connect it to a 
real Linux machine. The problem is that I don't know how the Linux 
virtual machine talks to the array. It appears as /dev/sdb on the Linux 
virtual machine and is mounted via /etc/fstab like its just a regular HD 
on the machine.


So I figure some explanation of how we got here is in order. My previous 
boss bought VMWare thinking we could take 4 24-core machines and make 
one big 96-core virtual machine out of them. He has since retired. Since 
I was rather skeptical of VMWare from the start, the job of dealing with 
the cluster was given to a co-worker. He has since moved on. I know just 
enough about VMWare ESXI to keep the thing working. My new boss wants to 
get rid of VMWare and re-install everything on the bare metal machines.


The VMWare host has 4 ethernet cables running to the switch. But there 
is only 1 virtual network port on the Linux virtual machine.   However, 
lspci shows 32 "lines with VMware PCI Express Root" (whatever that is):


# lspci
00:07.7 System peripheral: VMware Virtual Machine Communication 
Interface (rev 10)
00:10.0 SCSI storage controller: LSI Logic / Symbios Logic 53c1030 PCI-X 
Fusion-MPT Dual Ultra320 SCSI (rev 01)
00:11.0 PCI bridge: VMware PCI bridge (rev 02)
00:15.0 PCI bridge: VMware PCI Express Root Port (rev 01)
[...]
00:18.7 PCI bridge: VMware PCI Express Root Port (rev 01)
02:00.0 Ethernet controller: Intel Corporation 82545EM Gigabit Ethernet 
Controller (Copper) (rev 01)


The open-iscsi package is not installed on the Linux virtual machine. 
However, the ISCSI array shows up as /dev/sdb:

# lsscsi
[2:0:0:0]    disk    VMware   Virtual disk     1.0   /dev/sda
[2:0:1:0]    disk    EQLOGIC  100E-00          8.1   /dev/sdb


I'd kinda like to get the ISCSI array connected to a new bare metal 
Linux server w/o losing everybody's files. Do you think I can just 
follow the various hotos out there on connecting an ISCSI array w/o too 
much trouble?