LSI MegaRAID + ESXi 5 - Deep analysis

[wolfHH]

Hi all,

Im running an ESXi 5 host with Patch 768111 and an LSI 9260-4i Raidcontroller and I want to manage my Raid on a virtual maschine with the MegaRAID Storage Management Tool. I installed the latest LSI Driver and the latest SIMS Provider. Everthing looks good so far...

My problem is simple: The MegaRAID Storage Management Tool doesnt show the ESXi host to connect to.

And here we go deep.

I catched some packets with wireshark and found out, that the MegaRAID Storage Management Tool sends a broadcast for an slp server asking for the "wbem" service. Obviosly the esxi is running an slpd server... and i think the also running /bin/cimslp uses apis to register all services at the slpd. But due to the fact, that the slpd server does not answer, i think there is a problem within the registration.

The MegaRAID Storage Management Tool just waits for a short answer "hey, your wbem service is located here: http://static:5898", but because he gets no answer he can not show the server.

Does anybody have an idea how i could fix this problem? Had anybody already this problem and could solve my problem?

I found some forums and I thinks this is a general problem? Could this be?

Thank you guys

[AlexAT]

Yes. It is SLP server in ESXi that does not respond to multicast queries from MSM/RWC2 (but responds to unicast perfectly).

The clean solution is here (SLP protocol (the root cause of the problem) multicast to unicast proxy):

http://alex-at.ru/it/lsi-vmware-esxi-1 (use Google Translate if you don't understand Russian)

Tool download link: http://alex-at.ru/media/blogs/alex/Code/slp_helper.zip

Short instructions:

1. I assume you have ESXi, MSM/RWC, LSI driver under ESXi and LSI CIM/SMIS providers for ESXi all installed and ready to go.

2. Unzip tool mentioned above (it contains PHP 5.4 runtime, therefore so large, ~3Mb ZIP)

3. Edit slp_helper.php file with text editor, look for "$unicast_ips = array('192.168.1.1');". Place IP of your ESXi servers to manage here (in single quotes, comma-separated if many).

4. Run runme.cmd. Tool will start and must display no errors (only the startup information). After that it'll begin logging SLP requests to screen. It's enough to have one copy of tool in LAN, it will proxy all multicast SLP requests to ESXi servers specified.
5. Run MSM/RWC2. Discover hosts.

6. Enjoy.

[mhaslhofer]

The solutin provided by AlexAT worked for me - thanks!

[bmalone667]

Just FYI. When I tried this the PHP would give about a sidebyside error.  I had to install Visual Stuido Redistrib x86 (x64 didn't work) for the issue to resolve.