Accessing the same storage through different transport protocols, such as iSCSI and Fibre Channel is unsupported

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:

• Accessing the same storage through different transport protocols, such as iSCSI and Fibre Channel, you experience VMware Virtual Center Server alarms and events for datastores disconnecting and reconnecting.
   
• You can see storage heartbeat timeouts for storage connected through different protocols in the hosts's /var/log/vmkernel.log, similar to this:
  
  2014-10-07T22:21:03.587Z servername Hostd: [6CDC2B70 info 'Vimsvc.ha-eventmgr'] Event 218 : Lost connectivity to storage device naa.6090a######################04010. Path vmhba34:C1:T12:L0 is down. Affected datastores: Datastore123.

Note: This log excerpt is an example. Date, time, and environmental variables may vary depending on your environment.

 

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5.x

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.x

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0.x

Resolution

This is expected behavior. Connecting from the same host to the same datastores through different protocols is unsupported. The Storage Guide, Networked Storage section for ESXi 5.5 states:
 

The same LUN cannot be presented to an ESXi host or multiple hosts through different

storage protocols. To access the same LUN, the hosts must always use a single protocol,

for example, either Fibre Channel only or iSCSI only.

Additional Information

For additional information, see:

• Networked Storage in the ESXi 6.5 Storage Guide  
• Networked Storage in the ESXi 6.7 Storage Guide
• Networked Storage in the ESXi 7.0 Storage Guide