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Re: esx5i + VSA HP P4000 Boot problem.

 
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Florian Schmutz
Frequent Advisor

esx5i + VSA HP P4000 Boot problem.

hiii ;) its me again ^^

 

Hmm OK the thing with the how to design in point of VMDKs in the previous post was really helpful thanks again for the feedbacks.

 

Well in thinking about what to do if I have a power outage on this System I found a problem

 

HP Requires that the VSA is booting at the first place on the ESXi Servers. So long no problem..

But if the VSA is booted the ESX have to do a storage rescan to see the Luns witch the VSA is presenting and if I'm right the ESX Does this automate. At the boot but not after that.

 

Hm did any one knows how to configure ?

 

Kind Regards

 

Florian

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Stephane105
Occasional Visitor

Re: esx5i + VSA HP P4000 Boot problem.

Did you find the solution to this problem ? I have the same exact problem.

On boot, ESXi scans the datastore and declares the VSA datastores as not available. VSA then continue to boot correctly. Other VMs do not start since their datastores are invalid. The only way to continue is to go to vSphere and rescan the luns.

St├йphane

5y53ng
Regular Advisor

Re: esx5i + VSA HP P4000 Boot problem.

If you must shut down your entire cluster you could disconnect the iSCSI initiator on each ESX host before shutting down. You can then start your VSAs and allow them to resync. Once your cluster is synchronized you can then connect your iSCSI initiator and rescan.

Stephane105
Occasional Visitor

Re: esx5i + VSA HP P4000 Boot problem.

Hi

The VSA in this case is a VM running on the host locally. 2 servers run a VSA VM to offer the redundant storage service. After a power outage for both servers, ESXi scans the datastores. It finds the VSA VM locally and initiates it. Other VMs configured on VSA datastores do not start since the VSA service is not there yet. Once VSA finishes booting, it offers its storage but ESXi does not rescan automatically for the newly available storage service. The VMs never start and one must use vSphere to manually rescan the storage and start the VMs.

Therefore, the VSA solution with software only has a major flaw on a power outage. We are looking for an automatic solution for this problem since a power outage can happen anytime and there should not be a need for manual intervention.

What is the solution for this?

Stephane

Tedh256
Frequent Advisor

Re: esx5i + VSA HP P4000 Boot problem.


@Stephane105 wrote:

Therefore, the VSA solution with software only has a major flaw on a power outage. We are looking for an automatic solution for this problem since a power outage can happen anytime and there should not be a need for manual intervention.

What is the solution for this?


I am not aware of any mechanism that could compel ESX hosts to rescan storage adapters after a delay upon startup. Maybe if you had the esx management appliance installed on local storage, then you could schedule a scan like this every x min after startup? Not sure, and I expect not. But worth a look if it's important to you.

 

Othersise, the solution would be to purchase a hardware SAN? A P4300 works a treat. Or, of course, there are a million others.

 

Or, purchase a data-center quality UPS (or generator) that provides reasonable run-time to get beyond temporary power failures.

 

 

5y53ng
Regular Advisor

Re: esx5i + VSA HP P4000 Boot problem.

I concur with Ted's comment about a UPS if you are concerned about power outages.

 

On another note, you might be able to use SNMP traps from the cluster and the the VMware remote CLI, or the VMware Perl toolkit to execute a script on each host to rescan. Your network management system would receive a trap from the cluster once the resync is complete, and then run the iSCSI rescan script, resident on each host. Once your hosts see all of their targets you could start your virtual machines. You might be able to automate this entire process depending on what you use for network management and your scripting / coding skills.

 

 

Florian Schmutz
Frequent Advisor

Re: esx5i + VSA HP P4000 Boot problem.

Hi Together

 

Nope the Problem ist still Pending. Iv not recived any Solution for that.

The idea with the VCLI Script is a good one i have thinking about that by my self. butt yes... i have no Server or PC witch i can install the VCLI to setup a scipt like that. Maybe there must be a other solution ...

 

Kind Regards

 

Florian

 

Version2
New Member

Re: esx5i + VSA HP P4000 Boot problem.

I am working on the same issue here.  Has anyone come up with a good solution to this problem as of yet?  I have tried staggering boots on my host machines to allow storage to come online.  This is not fool proof.  A much better way would be to schedule a rescan after the VSA is booted.

 

Anyone?

 

doublejae
Visitor

Re: esx5i + VSA HP P4000 Boot problem.

Anyone come up with a solution to this yet??  In my mind this is a HUGE issue with the VSA solution and I can't believe that is hasn't been addressd by HP!!

I've heard that there is a script solution to force the ESXi host to perform an iSCSI rescan however the issue becomes timing.  How do you schedule this script to run AFTER the VSA VM boots and BEFORE the rest of the VMs try to power on??

Florian Schmutz
Frequent Advisor

Re: esx5i + VSA HP P4000 Boot problem.

nope XD u can do the hack with the scribt but i dont engineered this.....

 

Anyway my expiriance with ESX5.x + Iscsi + VSA is anyway verybad.....

So at this ESX Revision i dont recomend VSA... in Case of an existig bug witch can totally stuck your ESX and so also your Storage wath creates realy nice effects on your Storage replication till VM Corruption.......