topic Does FlexFabric and ESXi work? in BladeSystem - General

Does FlexFabric and ESXi work?

Rmitchell_1 — Thu, 18 Aug 2011 18:21:57 GMT

We have two c7000 chassis with bl460g7 blades and FlexFabric modules. We have had a support issue open with HP and VMware trying to get our ESXi farms to work.

Problem:

We have issues where an ESXi host will lock several datastores and not release the locks. This causes several VMs to stop responding and it takes the effort of rebooting our ESXi hosts to fix it. Our BL460g7 blades run ESXi 4.1 u1 (the April 2011 image from HP with the CIM agents). HP and VMware made us patch everything just the other day. Firmware on everything plus all the VMware patches.

Still we get the locking issues. We do use IBM storage but we don't have any other issues with our other ESX farms that are also using the same storage. Obviously both parties are pointing their fingers at each other so we're just trying to find out if anyone out there has a simalr configuration (storage may vary) and that is solid and working.

Currently we have verbose logging enabled on the Emulex CNA's and we're just waiting for another locking event.

Re: Does FlexFabric and ESXi work?

hairyfish — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 04:14:44 GMT

I hope it works, we've just invested heavily in c7000/bl460cG7 and bl465c G7 with FlexFabric, ESXi, Nexus switches, and EVA and 3PAR Storage.

I've been reading up heavily on all of the above and I found a few comments about Flex not being the best solution. Our farm has been up a week and is working fine so far. Fingers crossed it stays that way

Re: Does FlexFabric and ESXi work?

Rmitchell_1 — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 14:21:30 GMT

We have invested quite heavily as well. We have meetings this afternoon and I"ll update this thread when I recieve a resolution. So far the networking side of things works great...its the LUN locking part that is not working right.

Re: Does FlexFabric and ESXi work?

Rmitchell_1 — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 19:11:30 GMT

Well, after getting VMware, HP and their contacts at Emulex together we could not come up with a solution. Granted, after 3 weeks of having the problem, we didn't let them do any more advanced troubleshooting...we dropped back and punted. We installed the 8/24 Brocade switches as well as the 8G Qlogic adapters and we have been running clean ever since. Still a great solution...better in my mind...but we hoped flexfabric would work for everything. Now it just does the networking.

Re: Does FlexFabric and ESXi work?

Davy Priem — Tue, 30 Aug 2011 08:20:56 GMT

I'm even having corrupted network traffic when using vSphere5. I hope HP comes with an updated emulex drivers soon.