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Observed strange behavior with VSA

 
5y53ng
Regular Advisor

Observed strange behavior with VSA

I was spinning up a new system with six VSAs (v9.5) and I thought the hosts were unusually slow in responding. I found the throughput to the local disks attached to the VSA were maxed out (nearly 3GBps). I don't remember this happening in the past, so I deleted everything in the CMC and started over. 

 

I was able to determine the start of this behavior is when I add a VSA to a new management group. The througput on the local disks immediately spikes as if the VSA is zeroing out all the storage attached to it. No cluster or volumes even exist at this point, so it's not as if there is a restripe occuring. The RAID status on the VSA themselves shows normal. At some point overnight the VSAs finish whatever they are doing and then it's business as usual. 

 

Does anyone know if adding a VSA to a management group causes it to zero out its attached storage or some other disk intensive process? 

 

Thanks.

 

Additional info:

 

1. Everything is licensed

2. VSA RAID status shows normal prior to adding nodes to management group

3. Email configuration is only alarm present (don't use it)

 

2 REPLIES 2
oikjn
Honored Contributor

Re: Observed strange behavior with VSA

the wording is a bit unclear... was that six hosts with one VSA each or one host with 6 VSAs?  if the latter, that isn't supported.

 

As for the disk activity at the startup of a VSA, I THINK its doing a "background" formatting/initilization of the disk(s).  Did you create virtual disks during the creation of the VSA or are you doing disk passthrough?

5y53ng
Regular Advisor

Re: Observed strange behavior with VSA

Sorry. Six ESXi hosts with a single VSA each. Virtual disks attached to each VSA. I don't recall this behavior in the past and I have built dozens of systems. Maybe I haven't been paying attention? :)