MD3200i Issues

[Skyward-willw]

VMware ESX 4.1 and ESXi 4.1

MD3200i firmware 07.75.28.60 and NVSRAM N26X0-775890-009

Continually seeing "Lost access to volume" in VMware server's Events.

MD3200i keeps moving the MDL drives to Controller 0 even though Controller 1 is prefered.  If I move them back it swaps them after a couple minutes.

Our SAS LUN does not experience this issue (connecting to only two of the 7 hosts) but is also having the "Lost access to volume" issue.

Any ideas?  I have set up at least 20+ iSCSI SANs in the last 2 years for VMware and never had issues like this...stumped.

[Skyward-willw]

More info, iSCSI is isolated to a VLAN on the network, no errors on switch ports for hosts or iSCSI ports on SAN, flow control enabled.

Not using Jumbo Frames, using Software Initiator, SATP properly recognized the SAN as SATP-LSI, Fixed, MRU, and Round Robin cause the same behavior.

I see a number of people having the "Lost access to volume" errors with this SAN, but no real solutions.

Any thoughts?

[JohnADCO]

I was dealing with this issue a while back with a non profit we donate IT work to.    Not sure it was this exact MD,  but we found ownership didn't work as epxected on them.   Contorller ownership followed the DG not the VD.      Was a mess to sort out, but eventually I got it stable.  I had to re-orginaze the entire san though.    We had extensive experience with MD3000i's and the new scheme sure through us for a loop.

Not saying this has anything to do with your issues,  but it merrits checking it out.

[Skyward-willw]

It does follow the DG, but I can't figure out why the MD3200i keeps flipping the DG to the other controller.