P4300 G2 Starter SAN

[damogill]

Hey peeps,

I have just setup two P4300's for a customer and have sucessfully migrated all his data from his MD3000i DELL SAN and I am happy with the performance... well all but for one thing.

When doing snapshots or clones in VMware I get long timeouts and lots of failures. The snapshot most of the time doesn't compelte and VMware moans and either creates it and doesnt mount it or the VM just locks up and becomes unusable.

I have the following setup:

2 x P4300 G2's running 8.5.00.0319.0
Bonded NIC's using ALB
Each NIC goes to its own HP 1810G-24 switch
Both switches are linked up with an aggregated link

The iSCSI setup on the ESX hosts is:

1 x vswitch
2 x NIC's
2 x VMK's each with their own dedicated NIC using a port group polcy
Each VMK is bound to the SWISCSI Initator using swiscsi commands

There are no more than 3 VM's per LUN and Exchange has its own dedicated logs/data LUN.

All data is on VMFS volumes as the customer uses Veeam.

Attached is one of the clone errors.. here is a snapshot error:


Create virtual machine snapshot
Windows 2003 R2 Standard x86
Error
encountered
while saving
pending
snapshot file
"/vmfs/volu-
mes/4c2452-
f0-e039c8d2-
96f6-78e7d1-
f86166/Win-
dows 2003
R2 Standard
x86/Windows
2003 R2
Standard x86
-Snapshot2.-
vmsn".
Reported I/O
error is
Generic error
View details...
ADVANCETAPES\administrator
25/06/2010 12:31:20
25/06/2010 12:31:20
25/06/2010 12:33:44


This has been logged with HP and will be logged with VMware monday. Has anyone any insights?

Also on another query has anyone tried moving the vswap files to a dedicated LUN?

[damogill]

Rebooted all the equipment in the rack and now performance is OK again. Hoping there isnt an issue on the switch side that was causing the I/O stuff... hoping it doesnt creep back in over time!