Heads up! vSphere 5.1 and VMAX

This one is less critical than the PP/VE one I just did (since the fix is already in all the GA code), but, good to know.

vSphere 5.1 changes the behavior of VAAI Hardware Accelerated Locking (aka ATS) to no longer work with transient (sometimes on/sometimes off) ATS behavior, and older (i.e. non-current) versions of Enginuity will fail to create VMFS-5.

Short version:

• Symptom: when you create a VMFS-5 datastore you get this error:  "An error occurred during host configuration. See the error stack for details on the cause of this problem.”
• Cause: on older enginuity builds, when ATS calls are issued for tracks that have “Never Written By Host”(NWBH), sometimes the ATS call fails.
• Fix: Enginuity Fix 62286 addresses this issue and is available via Enginuity Pack at 5875. Fix 62286 is also available in the GA release of 5875.267.201 and is in all GA versions of Enginuity 5876.  With this fix, a VMFS-5 data store can be created successfully.
• The following workaround will address the issue if the fix is not on the Symmetrix and for some reason you can’t apply the fix (Symm hotfixes are non-disruptive):
• Disable HardwareAcceleratedLocking on the VMware host.
• Create VMFS-5 data store.
• Re-enable HardwareAcceleratedLocking on the VMware host.
• If you are installing ESXi 5.1 on a Symmetrix LUN in a boot-from-SAN configuration, there is no workaround without installing the fix.  Once the data store has been created, subsequent removal and re-creation with Hardware Accelerated Locking enabled is successful.

This is covered in EMC ETA emc289707, available to all customers, EMC folks and EMC partners.

Comments

[Cormac]

We got this called out in the 5.1 release note too Chad - https://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere5/doc/vsphere-esx-vcenter-server-51-release-notes.html#knownissues