Dell MD3000i and vSphere 5.5

[xadox]

Actualy I am on vSphere 5.1. Running two ESX 5.1 Servers on Dell R805 and Storage on a Dell MD3000i.

Is anybody out there running vSphere 5.5 in combination with a Dell MD3000i SAN?

Since the MD3000i is also not compatible with the version 5.1 I am using.

[DELLKennyK]

The MD3000i is not supported to run ESX 5.1 or 5.5. With the MD3000i being an older system it is only supported to run ESX 3.5, 4.0, and 4.1.

ftp://ftp.dell.com/Manuals/all-products/esuprt_ser_stor_net/esuprt_powervault/powervault-md3000i_Ref...

There is the support matrix for the MD3000i. Please let me know if you have any other questions or concerns.

[xadox]

Yes you are right. As I write in my starting post I already new it.

But as you see I am also using the MD3000i under vSphere 5.1 so I am asking if it is also working on v5.5.

[alamosajimmy]

Did you ever get an answer on this issue?

[xadox]

Only that it is not on the compatibility list.

[Swissnic]

I'm running ESXi 5.5 on 2 x PE2950 vIII's connected to an MD3000i.

No problems so far - all running sweet.  I did build the environment fresh - no upgrades.  I'll post if I hit any issues!

Cheers, Nic.

[bkilinski]

Hi,

I am running ESXi 5.5 on 2x R910s connected redundantly to an MD3000i+MD1000+MD1000. Things are running well with one exception:

I am have about 25-30 VMs powered on at any given time. Just last week, all of my VMs took a huge performance hit and the CPU meter on the cluster went from 170GHz free to 200GHz over provisioned. RAM and storage stayed the same. This fluctuated a lot for days. We are in the process of migrating Windows XP VMs to Windows 7, so I deleted 10 VMs and changed the logging at all levels (hosts, cluster, etc..) to NORMAL (was at verbose). I then submitted a ticket to VMware. They got back to me asking if the problem was reproducible. It was not. We then went down the list of hardware I was using and this is how we discovered that the MD3000i was not compatible. He would troubleshoot no further and would only suggest to update all drivers and firmware on all hardware since I was not using compatible hardware (understand, but to completely drop everything due to this is not what I wanted to hear.) It seemed that the 800MB of logs was not even looked at to determine the problem, anyway, back to the point:

It has been working flawlessly since I deleted VMs and changed the logging level. I am going to continue to use the MD3000i for another 15 months until it is in the budget to upgrade. I hope this helps.

[The_Bublitz · Accepted solution]

We are running 2 separate md3000i's with Dell R710's.  I have ran it on vsphere 5.0, 5.1, and 5.5.
The current 5.5 host runs Veeam DR, so it has I/O from Veeam jobs but only hosts 2 running vm's.
We are moving 2 production hosts to 5.5 soon, not anticipating any problems.

Make sure to have the newest firmware on the md3000i itself - the last firmware update I am fairly sure is very important for compatibility above 4.5.

The few rumors I've heard about compatibility were about failover - I still need to test failover by pulling network cables and forcing a failover to make sure vmware doesn't freak out. 

[IMAMikeM]

I am also running an MD3000i on vsphere 5.5 without any issues. Currently my vmware cluster has 2 vsphere 4.x and 2 vsphere 5.5's. I just added the 5.5 servers last week.

Firmware on the MD hasn't been touched since installed 4 years ago.

Current configuration
	Firmware version:	07.35.22.61
	NVSRAM version:	N1532-735890-004
	EMW version:	03.35.G6.50
	AMW version:	03.35.G6.50

[Topperinou]

Hi there,

I can see that some people experience somme issues with md3000i and vSphere 5.5 and some does not.

Comment from IMAMikeM is very interesting : despeite he's using a quite old firmware on his md3000i it works for him with vSphere 5.5

So I got a question to all of you guys who have a running md3000i running with vSphere 5.5 :

What is your configuration ?

Do you use CHAP authentication (maybe here is the key) ?

What do you use as iSCSI ? a linked broadcom iSCSI card to vmkernel or embedded iSCSI software from esxi (does this latter still exists under vSphere 5.5 ?)

Thanks a lot for your answers !