Hi all,
I've got at setup with 4 Dell R610 Servers running ESX 4.0 (294855) using 2 Dell MD3000i storage units.
These servers have broadcom 5709 NIC's in them
Now, this cluster has been running for quite some time without any errors, so we figured we should update to ESX 4.1 due to new and improved features.
After updating we came across the problem when ESX 4.1 adds the BCM nic's as hardware iscsi HBA's, this causes the sw iscsi hba to loose its bindings.
Funny thing is that this error diddnt take affect until 7-10 days after updating to 4.1. All ESX 4.1 hosts lost its connection to the datastore and everything went down.
After talking to Dell and reading communities we discovered that the Md3000i is not compliant with ESX 4.1 at our given firmware. The solution was then to downgrade ESX to 4.0 U2 again. One of our MD3000i's had its firmware updated to version 07.35.31.60 and the other is running 06.70.17.60
All VM slices was restored from backup to a DR cluster running with decreased performance.
Now the work with downgrading our primary cluster to 4.0 U2 starts and i have gotten one of the ESX hosts to connect to both datastores. I have also reinstalled two other ESX hosts to 4.0 U2 and one host is left at ESX 4.1
On the first host i reinstalled i can see both datastores just fine, but i cannot get the other two hosts to see any of the MD3000i's
I've tried the following:
- Disable ESX firewall
- Added all Md3000i Iscsi controller IP's to dynamic discovery
- Changed the iscsi WWN/name on the MD3000i as the hosts get a new ID after reinstall
- Service console is added to the vmkernel
- verified that iscsi is enabled.
I'm attaching screenshots from both the working ESX host and one of the once which will not connect to the MD3000i. Should i also attach some logs from the ESX console? if so which one?
I've gone thru this config a few hundred times now and cant really see any differences.
Any help is much appriciated!
