Hot-replace fibre switch

[Joshua Small_2]

Hi,

We have a C7000 with redundant B-series 8/24 SAN switches connected to a P2000 via fc. Each blade is running ESXi 4.1.

We have confirmed that, within each ESXi instance, each LUN presented is seen on both HBAs with two paths - ensuring our zoning, presentation, and multipathing is accurate.

During our availability testing, we confirmed that if you hot pull a SAN switch, there is no interuption to service and all active paths migrate over to the operating switch.

When plugging that switch back in, it appears to hot plug fine, in that it becomes accessible etc. It does not however appear to connect to the individual blades.

ESXi continues to report the uplnk as "dead" and viewing the connected WWN's on the switch interface shows you all the SAN interfaces, but none of the blades.

Rebooting a blade corrects this issue (for that blade). It does leave the installation a bit less "hot pluggable" than I expected however by the time you need to reboot 16 servers.

Any advise on this appreciated.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Is it possible to do a refresh on the ESX blades? - of what they see via the FC HBA?

What do you mean it shows all the SAN interfaces? - Is that all the host ports on the P2000? What did a switchshow say?

Maybe an OA reseat, restart or maybe you can unassign/reassign the port mapping in OA?

Are you running a 'release set' of all the c-class firmwares? (Brocade switches are not listed in there - you can find the supported ones on hp spock).

[Jorge Pons]

Hi

versions of FW are update?
The ESX dont see switches OK, but from Onboard, have the same problem or see OK.

Regards, Jorge

[Zygmunt Krawczyk]

Which type of HBA do you have (QLogic, Emulex, Brocade)?

[Johan Guldmyr]

And what kind of blades?

[Joshua Small_2]

Hi,

The blades are BL490c G6's. They were updated using Smartupdate 9.2 DVD with iLO supplemental update 2.15.

The OA is running 3.21 and it was reseated as part of our testing.

The SAN switches were upgraded from 6.2.2 to 6.3.2c during testing - problem existed before and after upgrade.

Yes, I do mean that the switch, after a hotplug, will see the SAN's HBAs, but not the Blade HBAs.

The OA lists everything as "connected" and a map/unmap does not help.

ESXi does have a vicfg-rescan command. It does discover recovered paths when, for example, we test removing a cable between the SAN switch and the SAN and reconnecting it. It does not however assist in this case.

[Joshua Small_2]

Interesting addition - the Flex-10 modules in use don't have this issue.
That is to say, I can pull one out, put it back in, and the network link on a blade fails over, then comes back up into redundant mode.

[Johan Guldmyr]

Hey!

Do you have a VC-FC module as well?

I'm a bit stumped :p Is this supposed to work?

[Joshua Small_2]

No, I did not have a VC-FC module in place.

I just found a vmware discussion that seemed to place this as normal though:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/304521?tstart=60

[Trygve Henriksen]

Maybe the 6.4.1 update for the Switches can help?