How to set up the Software iSCSI initiator in ESXi

Go to the Inventory  Hosts and Clusters  Configuration  Storage Adapters screen

Click the iSCSI Software Adapter, if it’s not present simply click the Add button on the top right of the screen to add the iSCSI Software Adapter.

As you can see here that no paths have been configured, click the Properties button from the lower pane to bring up the iSCSI Initiator properties.

Click Network Configuration

Now we need to add the Port Groups, Click Add

Add each required port group individually.

We now have 1 port groups added to the iSCSI Initiator, click the Dynamic Discovery tab

Add the IP or Host name for your iSCSI storage, click on the Static Discovery tab. Click Close

Click Yes

We now have four paths to the iSCSI Storage server but we would only be using a single path back to our storage so we need to change our Path Selection setting from MRU (Most Recently Used) to Round Robin.

Right click the LUN and choose Manage Paths…

Change the Path Selection to Round Robin.

Changing to Round Robin has made all the Paths Active and all of them are now being used to issue I/O to the LUN.

Repeat these steps on all hosts.

Once you have completed these step you iSCSI should be ready to present the LUNs/DataStores.