Loosing connection to SAN lun

[#1]

hi everyone!

I have what I consider a re-occuring issue. Every 2-3 months, one of my HP hosts, looses it's conection to one of the two data stores.

I was wondering what might cause this to happen.

We have 2 hosts, both HP dl 365 G5's running a mix of ubuntu LTS 8.04 JEOS servers, and windows 2003 servers. Both hosts have 32 GB ram, and are hardly stressed. The iscsi SAN is a 1 TB, raid 5 box built by a company called Cachengo, with 4 SATA drives, and 8 gb ram.

It's a very nice unit, and the only reason why we went with it was it was affordable, since we are a public library.

It's has 2 LUN's both 620 gb. The san is connected to the hosts via a 1 g netgear switch. We use Vsphere 4.0 ESS and HA.

Yesterday, for 3rd third time, one of the hosts lost connection to one SAN LUN, and all 15 vm's on it. I was finally able to reboot the san, and re-add all the vm's back into inventory.

thanks in advance for any insight of what might be causing this.

Peter

[lil328i]

So I'd like to close this thread so everyone knows what was happening.

Looks like we totally exceeded the I/O of our 4 drive  SATA based SAN. We had up to 28 vm we were running, and it started to crash once a month, the last time it never came back up.

We since upgrade to a new EMC Ax4-5 and we couldn't be happier. We also added a third host. I highly recommend the Clariion san. It's easy to configure using the Express GUI, you dont need anything else.

Took me a a few minutes to configure 5 lun's that I  can resize on the fly if needed.

Thanks!