Hello Ashley, you still can present Scaleio storage built on CentOS hosts to VMware host(s) without iSCSI and NFS. Scaleio has native SDC (Storage Data Client) for ESXi implemented as a VIB extenstion, which effectivelly is a storage initiator (client) that communicates with storage targets (servers). It is the front-end storage protocol and multipathing driver instead of iSCSI/NFS and NMP.  While the standard installation is converged where everything is install symetrically using scripted wizzards, you can decouple the system in many ways...
Hi, I'm having a problem exposing the scaleIOs to our ESX hosts. I have created the volume called "ScaleIO-Dev" I have checked our VMware host configuration and enabled the iSCSI iniator as we would and as we do for hooking up to our existing ZFS based SANs. The name of our internal server itself is; dnzakesx-backup01.dsldev.local so logically the iqn name according to the standards should be something like; iqn.2015-06.dsldev.local:dnzakesx-backup01  when I try and and map the volume to a scsi_initiator; scli --map_volume_to_scsi_initiator --volume_name ScaleIO-Dev --initiator_name iqn.2015-06.dsldev.local:dnzakesx-backup01 --mdm_ip a.b.c.d  I get a message back; Error: initiator_name too long: 'iqn.2015-06.dsldev.local:dnzakesx-backup01'  when I shorten the iscsi initiator name to something like say; iqn.2015-06:backup01 Error: MDM failed command.  Status: Could not find the SCSI Initiator  Why am I getting an "initiator too long" on a perfectly valid DNS name? Are there any DNS lookups/reverse DNS lookups taking place as part of the connection to validate the iqn name? Why am I not able to map the volume to the iniator? If it helps I'm running the 3xCentOS7 VMs with 3 NICs each - one the management nic, the other 2 for the iscsi traffic (on different vlans).  cheers Ashley
volume mappings to initiators.