Hi Carl,
I assume you have host attach kit etc. installed on you ESX hosts... best practice implementation...
So: To get rid of the reservations a short term workaround would possibly be to shut down the respective fc interface towards the frontend SAN for a few minutes - e.g. for 0c: "fcp config 0c down" ... "fcp config 0c up" Or even to restart (brute force approach) the fcp service (fcp stop / start).
The better and proactive approach to avoid this issue could be to set the fc ports on the FC switch to "f-port" (if they are set to "auto").
I'd be glad to get feedback from you if those hints helped to solve the issue (or not). In any case it's wise to involve our support and open a case in parallel.
Best Regards, Chris
-----Original Message----- From: Carl Howell [mailto:chowell@uwf.edu] Sent: Mittwoch, 19. September 2007 23:52 To: toasters@mathworks.com Subject: ESX FC Give & Take
I'm troubleshooting an issue we're having with three ESX 3.01 hosts connected to a FAS3050c via Fibre Channel.
After a takeover of the filer node that has active VM/LUN's running on it, the following appears in the /var/log/vmkernel file of the ESX host that owns the active VM's:
Device vmhba2:0:2 has disappeared but is currently in use and could not be removed. Device vmhba2:0:3 has disappeared but is currently in use and could not be removed.
On the other two ESX hosts, this appears in the /var/log/vmkernel file:
Device vmhba2:0:2 has disappeared and has been removed. Device vmhba2:0:3 has disappeared and has been removed.
Now, the VM's survive the takeover and are still up and running, but if I attempt a giveback, all three hosts lose access to these LUN's and the VM's go down.
It appears to me that the ESX host that owns the active VM's has a SCSI reservation to these LUN's and a takeover is not enough to cause it to reset and remove that reservation(even though the paths failover properly).
This type of behavior is mentioned in http://www.vmware.com/community/thread.jspa?messageID=752442.
All of the timeout values have been verified etc. . .
Thanks in advance for the help,
--Carl