While working on an upgrade to vSphere 5.0U1 on a Cisco UCS environment, where the ESX hosts boot from SAN, I noticed one of the hosts was not registered correctly on the EMC VNX, as it showed up as unmanaged. Because the ESX hosts boot from SAN, the host has to be registered before it can auto register, and when it was registered manually the host was not able to update the registration. Continue reading
Tag Archives: VNX
Update on LUN connectivity issues with Storage vMotion on EMC VNX when using VAAI
A while ago I posted an article on LUN connectivity issues with Storage vMotion on EMC VNX when using VAAI we experienced.
Today I did received an e-mail from EMC they are able to reproduce our issues in their lab, which is an important step to get these issues resolved, since we can only do limited tests in our production environment. Great news to start the weekend. Will update again when I get more details on this.
Enabling VAAI on ESX5 on a per array base idea
Yesterday I wrote an article on issues when using a combination of CX4 and VNX in a vSphere 5 environment since ESX5 does not support on VAAI according to VMware and the VNX does. Simple solution would be to disable VAAI on all ESX5 hosts, but in that case your VNXes would also loose VAAI. Victor Forde pointed me to a blog post by Chris Wahl titeled “Forcing the NMP Plugin for Microsoft Clustering LUNs on vSphere” (good post by the way)
When reading this article, I realized you can not only use the array vendor and model strings to assign the VAAI filter driver to an array, but you might also be able to use the location (the combination of adapter, target, channel and LUN) for a device to assign the VAAI filter and VAAI Plugin to a specific array.
In short, you would need to remove the default VAAI filter and VAAI plugin rules for vendor=DGC and model=* and replace them by claim rules for based on the location where you would use the target identifier to filter on, for the array that would need to have VAAI enabled.
Unfortunately I don’t have a VNX in my lab (Someone at EMC that wants to trade my VNXe and a case of beer for a VNX? 😉 ) so I am not able to test if this would really do the trick. Continue reading
Challenges when upgrading environment with EMC CX4 to vSphere 5 and mixed CX4/VNX environment
Yesterday my good friend Gabrie van Zanten from Gabes Virtual World asked the following question on twitter:
How can I disable VAAI in vSphere5 on a per array basis? KB1033665 is not the solution #EMC #CX4 #VMware Dont want to disable for my VNX
— Gabrie (@gabvirtualworld) 18 juni 2012
My first reaction was “Why would Gabe want to disable VAAI on a per array basis isn the first place?” so I asked.
His answer was pretty simple and straight forward. He was working on an environment where ESX5 hosts had both EMC CX4s and VNXes connected, and VAAI was not supported on vSphere 5 for CX4, so he had to disable VAAI for the CX4’s and wanted to leave it on for the VNXes. Continue reading