ESXi 5.5 Hosts disconnecting from vCenter 5.5.0b

[sgunelius]

Good evening.  I've recently deployed some new HP BL465c G8 hosts running the HP OEM install for ESXi 5.5 (not the one just released on 02/18) and the two of the hosts have been disconnecting from vCenter four times over the past week.  I can sometimes login to the hosts via iLO and restart the vCenter agent, but more often than not have to hard boot the host.  On top of this, one of the VMFS5 datastore contents disappeared and the VMs residing on that datastore were down because the hosts couldn't find the VM's configuration files. Odd thing, the datastore showed spaced used and I could see all of the directories within CLI, but not from vCenter client or the Web-based Client.  I have two open tickets with HP's VMware support team, but wanted to know if anyone has encountered a similar issue.  I'm tempted to rebuild with the latest OEM install or rebuild them as 5.1 or 5.0 if the 5.5 version isn't fully baked.  Thanks.

Scott

[admin]

Can you have a look at the vmkernel log for the period of disconnects.

http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/site/hpsc/template.PAGE/public/kb/docDisplay?javax.portlet.begCache...

I have seen loads of this in 5.1, not entirely sure if I ever came across a 5.5 Gen 8 experiencing the issue or if HP fixed the AMS in that build out of the box.

Otherwise it is the usual suspects to look at for the timestamp and maybe a couple of minutes before:

Host:

vmkernel.log

vpxa.log

hostd.log

vCenter Server:

vpxd.log

[sgunelius · Accepted solution]

The issue turned out to be the HP OEM install and specifically the v1.1.7 driver for the QMH2572 HBAs it contained.  We rebuilt our ESXi 5.5 hosts using the HP OEM install released on 02/14 (contains the recommended
v1.1.12 driver) and that resolved the stability issue.

Scott