A couple of EMC/VMware issues to know about….

Every day there are a bunch of “hot issues” that come up – most aren’t worth a broadcast (which can actually cause more damage than it helps) but these two are (IMO) worth drawing attention to for the sake of the customer.

• Emulex HBAs with vSphere (frankly – this isn’t an EMC issue per se, but since customers look to eLab for HBA firmware revs…)   It was discovered by Ralf Kastl (who is just a GREAT EMCer – thanks Ralf) during a customer case.

  “while working on SR XXXXXXXX we figured out that there’s an Issue with Emulex HBA  FW 2.0.0. A3 used by LPe12000 Adapters with ESX 4.x.

  Anytime the connection between the SAN switch and the CX SP’s were disconnected (i. e. during SP reboot), the ESX Servers are unable to reconnect automatically.

  This is caused by the used HBA FW Version, which is 2.0.0.A3 currently recommended by EMC (eLab Support Matrix)

  We’ve done excessive testing to isolate the problem and it’s definitively an issue caused by the HBA FW.

  The newer version 2.0.0.A4 is not affected by this problem, after implementing this version all seen problems are gone.”

I dug into this deeper with eLab and they got back to me lickety split.  The issue was reported to Emulex in March; we received a fix (2.0.0 A4) in late April not in time to retest and publish (in the eLab Support Matrix) in May.  However, the June 3rd ESM has been updated with the A4 FW rev.

SO – if you’re using the pretty common LPe12000 Adapters (which are great), make sure you’re on the A4 firmware, or you might have a bad day during an SP reboot (which also occurs during array OS updates for CX FLARE and VNX OS updates

UPDATE (July 20th, 2011, 10:48am ET) – A REALLY good post on HOWTO here (thank you Jon Kohler)… http://www.jmeow.com/blog/2011/6/19/managing-emulex-hbas-on-esxi.html

• We’re experiencing a couple VMware/EMC cases surrounding VAAI use.   Sometimes being the #1 choice when it comes to storage for VMware (including in some of the largest environments) means we uncover these things – I wish we didn’t, but we do.  The case counts I would still call rare, but we can reproduce the scenarios.   There is a VMAX epack planned.  On the VNX side, there’s only one VNX case, but reproduce-able – we’re working out the best way to resolve.  Stay tuned.

Comments

[pfuhli]

Hi Chad,

are you aware of the VAAI issue while using PowerPath? Because we use PowerPath we can't use VAAI. We have to comment out the claim rules for that.

Maybe you can dig a bit deeper in that issue because I think that this is not only "one" issue ;-)

Regards,

daniel