Dell R715 w/ EqualLogic Failover Cluster Validation Failure

Cluster Disk 0 does not support Persistent Reservations. Some storage devices require specific firmware versions or settings to function properly with failover clusters. Please contact your storage administrator or storage vendor to check the configuration of the storage to allow it to function properly with failover clusters.

Well that's just great. Another stepping stone into my hair turning grey and being yanked out at the roots. The above is what I get when I try to validate the cluster I'm building for Hyper-V. Connected are 3 hosts, each with MPIO iSCSI connections to a pair of EqualLogic PS6000 arrays hosting a 2TB LUN for data. I thought I had followed all the correct steps to get this to work... until this happened.

A little searching brought me to this thread on Technet which basically describes my issue to a T.

The root cause of the problem is the iqn name that is passed to the Equallogic. If you boot diskless and the first 34 characters of your IQN names are identical then you will have this problem with Windows 2008 R2 Datacentre Edition, for clustering.

Somewhere between the Microsoft ISCSI Initiator and the Broadcom driver/Boot ROM the iqn name is being concatenated to 34 characters. So when you attempt to do a Cluster Validation the requests for PR going to the Storage are essentially seen to be coming from the same host by the Equallogic, as the first 34 characters of the iqn names are identical.

So, the workaround is to make sure your IQNs are unique within the first 34 characters. I have adjusted mine to reflect the server names.

The IQN name field is supposed to accept 255 characters. It is unclear at the moment if the problem is a bug in Microsoft or Broadcom. But given the time taken to prove to Dell there actually was a problem....I am happy to go with the workaround.

I'm not going to blame Microsoft at this point... I am beginning to get the suspicion that these Broadcom NICs and drivers/firmware are nothing but complete crap and need to killed with fire.

Following those hints above and setting the IQN for each server to the hostname worked perfectly.