NetApp FAS270 w/ old firmware + ESXi 4 or 5

I've inherited this old NetApp FAS270 with firmware 7.0.3 and an iSCSI and CIFS license. This product is discontinued and I obviously do not have a "support plan" for it, so there's no way for me to get the most recent one (7.3.3.) - unless some charitable mind sends it to me! ;)

So I've decided to configure an iSCSI target on the FAS270 for my ESXi 5 host, but when I try to add the LUN, I cannot find it because the path to it is shown as "dead" in ESXi. Why? The FAS270, with this old firmware, does not support ALUA, and ESXi has a rule that will try to use ALUA with any NETAPP product.

So I did this to remove that rule from the ESXi CLI:

esxcli storage nmp satp rule remove -s VMW_SATP_ALUA -V NETAPP --claim-option="tpgs_on" --psp="VMW_PSP_RR" -b

This removed the SATP rule, but it still showed a "dead" path in ESXi. So just to make sure my NetApp device really does not go through any ALUA rule, I create a local rule for it:

esxcli storage nmp satp rule add -s VMW_SATP_LOCAL -V NETAPP

And then unclaimed any path to the device (especially the "dead" one):

esxcli storage core claiming unclaim -t location -A vmhba34 -C 0 -T 2 -L 0 

Where you can replace vmhba34 with your own, as well as your controller, target and LUN numbers.

Then re-scan your devices:

esxcfg-rescan vmhba

You should see your device with the status "alive" in ESXi, and you will be able to add your LUN as storage. If you want to check if it's there, from the CLI:

esxcli storage nmp device list