topic Re: ESX hosts lose SAN paths after switch firmware upgrade in Operating System - VMware

ESX hosts lose SAN paths after switch firmware upgrade

johnCatBE — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 12:18:54 GMT

Hello

We're in the process of upgrading SAN switch firmware (5.3.0x to 6.0.0c) in a dual-fabric mixed environment (ESX Polyserve EVA CA Sun cluster )

Did Fabric A switches last evening .. no probs with unix hosts or even Polyserve cluster members but we lost VMware hosts - ie no failover to other untouched fabric.

Details are ESX 3.5 / UP4
HP Blades BL465c (G) using emulex lightpulse cards.

Has anyone experienced similar issues? I was concerned that it might be due to compatibility with 6.0.0c firmware?

thanks

Re: ESX hosts lose SAN paths after switch firmware upgrade

Rob Buxton — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 06:55:02 GMT

Once lost some guests due to some time-out issues. There are some time out values you can set. But otherwise we've successfully updated SAN Switch firmware.
Were the LUNs showing correctly on both HBAs through the VC Console?

Re: ESX hosts lose SAN paths after switch firmware upgrade

johnCatBE — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 07:28:34 GMT

Yes our current theory is that VCB backups were underway on the impacted ESX servers at the time of the issues...........and that VCB might not cope with even a temporary hiatus in its storage............so in the event of nothing else coming to light were going to suspend or avoid our VCB backup windows when doing SAN maintenance.

Thanks

John

Re: ESX hosts lose SAN paths after switch firmware upgrade

Rob Buxton — Sat, 01 Aug 2009 00:32:05 GMT

Also, are you stopping at 6.0.0c? There are further updates. 5 to 6 is quite a jump, but that shouldn't have caused issues. You may want to look at updating to the latest release.

Re: ESX hosts lose SAN paths after switch firmware upgrade

johnCatBE — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 07:34:16 GMT

rob

No...........we're off to 6.1.1d in a couple of weeks time..........wanted to try and understand the ESX/VCB issue first though.

john

Re: ESX hosts lose SAN paths after switch firmware upgrade

Uwe Zessin — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 08:49:09 GMT

Yes, VCB is very unforgiving as it seems to do a lot of SCSI reservations.

Rob, are you talking about the Windows timeout values?

from cmd:
> reg query "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Disk" /v TimeOutValue
> reg add "HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\Disk" /v TimeOutValue /t REG_DWORD /d 60

Re: ESX hosts lose SAN paths after switch firmware upgrade

Rob Buxton — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:36:42 GMT

Uwe,
No there are timeout settings for ESX, Solaris etc. that go into the config files. We had some issues where we experienced timeouts with a link loop failure on the EVA. Windows servers typically survied but we had issues on ESX and Solaris Server. Our local HP guy gave us some values to add. Not at work so I don't have access to the parameters that were updated.

Re: ESX hosts lose SAN paths after switch firmware upgrade

Niels Vejrup Pedersen — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 10:27:38 GMT

Hi,

I've updated a lot of switches from 5.3 to 6.1.2 and 6.2.1 lately.

Doing Fabric A first and Fabric B afterwards without any issues.

To my knowledge the default timeout setting is 60 secs on VMware ESX 2.5 and onwards.

Regards