[UPDATE Sept 25th, 2012, 12:15am PT] – this has been fixed.
Customers, please read and follow this from EMC, and this from VMware.
Know that a lot of people work hard on your behalf – striving to get this sort of thing into the main releases – but perodically, we miss. On behalf of the people at EMC and VMware that have been working it – apologies, but also I want to give them a thank you – they’ve been working furiously to get it done as soon as possible.
Gang – one important heads up for customers using EMC PowerPath/VE who are looking to upgrade to vSphere 5.1.
In the later stages of the RC builds, a bug (and like all bugs – it’s not right to call it a “vSphere bug” or “EMC bug” – more right to call it a “solution bug”)
PowerPath 5.7 doesn’t load with vSphere 5.1, but the latest patch which was set to be released (02) can cause a PSOD.
The chances of PSOD increase with some combination of the following: a thread in the CIMOM (SFCB) holding an object open during a device close and ESXi not expecting it. For example, we could make it consistently PSOD having multiple rpowermt commands in progress during an ESXi reboot.
We also found a second issue (ESXi not saving all bytes of our persistent string) that was also root caused to ESXi and that VMware plans to fix in a vSphere hotfix.
Take away – for PowerPath/VE customers, hold off vSphere 5.1 upgrades (GA was yesterday). Hotfix P02 from EMC is in days, and so is the expected VMware fix.
You can read the VMware KB article here
Will this fix from VMWare be built-in to ESXi 5.1 or will it be an update? I ask this because i just downloaded the ESXi 5.1 ISOs and started researching on PowerPath version changes for 5.1 when i ran into the VMWare article you have listed.
Posted by: Razi Salman | September 12, 2012 at 05:01 PM