MSA 2324i / ESXi 4.1 U1 / HP BladeSystem c3000 Enclosure / BL460C G6 Servers - iSCSI connection lost

[Ricardo M. Esteves]

Hi,



Since a few days ago, my ESXi servers started to loose connection to two iSCSI ports of my MSA2324i, and the only away to get the connection back is to reboot the blades.



Anyone experienced this problem before?



Driver and Firmware versions:



MSA 2324i Firmware: M111R06

ILO 2 Firmware: 2.05

BL460C G6 Bios: I24 01/29/2011

GbE2c Layer 2/3 Ethernet Blade Switch Firmware: 5.1.3

ESXi: 4.1 U1 build 381591

bnx2 device firmware: bc 5.2.3

bnx2 driver version: 2.0.15g.8.v41.1

bnx2x device firmware: bc 5.2.7 phy baa0.105

bnx2x driver version: 1.60.50.v41.2



Network Cards:

Broadcom Corporation NetXtreme II 57711E/NC532i 10Gigabit Ethernet

Broadcom Corporation NC382m Dual Port 1Gbe Multifuntion BL-c Adaptor

The two ports of the NC532i are connected to switch 1, one port for normal network and the other for iSCSI

The two ports of the NC382m are connected to switch 2, one port for normal network and the other for iSCSI


On the MSA i have this configuration:

Port A1 (192.168.11.1) and B1 (192.168.11.3) of the MSA are connected to switch 1.

Port A2 (192.168.12.2) and B2 (192.168.12.4) of the MSA are connected to switch 2.

The only thing i changed in my system was installing a more recent version of the network cards drivers:

http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/dt_esx41_broadcom_netxtremeii_032311/ZHcqYnR0anBiZCpwcA


and upgraded the MSA 2324i Firmware to M111R06.

I've already tried to downgrade the MSA firmware back to M110R21, but the problem persists.

[Ricardo M. Esteves]

Anyone has any clue about this?

I've eard that having VMs that also connect to the storage luns via iscsi initiator could lead to this beaviour, is this true?