vSphere takes 10 minutes to reconnect to volume?

[Paul Hutchings]

Looks like it might be the vSphere ARP table timeout as if I look at before/after between the laptop and vSphere hosts they don't match - vSphere seems to stick on the "before".

There isn't an obvious way to clear it on ESXi so I may install ESX tomorrow and look at that.

I'm not entirely convinced though as enough people are presumably using P4000 with ESXi.

I'll be interested to see what HP come back with when the remote in.

[Paul Hutchings]

"If you are using multiple switches, it may also be your switches config that affect the vSphere host. VMware recommends disabling any STP methods on ESX connected ports. As an additional step, you could test your switch reboot scenario by disabling / disconnecting one of the ESX server interface that is a member of the iSCSI segment (assuming that you only use 2 interfaces). You will loose connectivity during the reboot but it should not take up to 10 minutes to ping your cluster IPs."

Ah we both replied at the same time I think.

Regarding STP/MSTP, right now it's simple enabled globally on the switch, I've not done anything to restrict it to the inter-switch link ports.

I believe with full ESX you can clear the ARP cache which should make troubleshooting much easier (hell even a cron job to clear it every minute would be better than this!!).

[Paul Hutchings]

Definitely the ARP table.

You can run "esxcli network neighbor list" from the CLI and see the arp table and the lifetime remaining in seconds.

As the lifetime counts down you can't ping the cluster IP, when the lifetime reaches zero ping starts working.

Bugger.

[adolbec]

Paul,

It does not help you but here is what I found about ARP control on ESXi: http://serverfault.com/questions/197918/clearing-arp-cache-on-esxi-4-1. My feeling is that you will have to open a support request with VMware. It seems to me that whenever a team has it interfaces reset, it should flush the existing dynamic info and learn again. If you have any workaround on the issue, would appreciate that you post back to the forum.

My 2 cents.

Good luck.

Alain

[Paul Hutchings]

Thanks Alain, the same link I used to see how to view the arp table :)

I'll see what L2 P4000 have to say first - enough people must be doing this that I don't see why I should be the only one to encounter this issue so it may be our configuration somehow (it's entirely HP kit so you'd think they would know it).

If not, I'll try ESX and check that emptying the arp cache manually works.

Appreciate the help/info/feedback :)