SCSI Bus Error with HP P212 SAS Controller after upgrading to V4

[ollixy]

Hi all,

after doing a standard install of vSphere esxi and configuring my (external) storage on a HP SA P212, I get timeouts on SCSI bus, as soon as I put some workload on the bus, e.g. installing a VM. This is very easy for me to reproduce as it happens every time. I checked and downgraded to 3.5iu4, and that's rock stable as it always has been. The hpsa driver in V4 is the rcommended version, so how should I proceed? And please, don't tell me to use v3.5 - this is planned for customer presentations...

[sossie7]

Hi I've got the same problem see my post here:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/226099?tstart=90

Basically although all your hardware is probably on the Vmware HCL - it possibly won't work in 4.0 because of the new "VMDirectPath IO" feature.

Below is some information I received from our VMware presales tech:

Previous ESX versions supported the SCSI passthrough mode for specific Adaptec cards (a 29xx chipset from memory, quite hard to come by now)

vSphere 4 added support for VMDirectPath IO for passing IO device control directly to a VM allowing the use of native drivers. The only SAS drivers experimentally supported are: LSI 3442e-R and 3801e (1068 chip based) 3Gb SAS adapters.

The other caveat is that the ESX server must be based on the new Nehalem architecture (I'm not sure if this includes the 2950's?)

I have had preliminary reports from other integration partners that they've had success with other SAS controllers on other platforms.

[ollixy]

Thank you for your reply. I don't really need the new "VMDirectPath IO" feature. My external disk storage is the only connected device, it's VMFS3 formatted and it's used by exactly one esxi server. No RAW-mappings etc. It probably is in LUN mode though, according to the error messages, so you might be right in your assumption anyway.

Is there a way to somehow disable that DirectPath feature, maybe it becomes stable then?

Ole

[sossie7]

Fo the settings for VMDirectPath, go to the configuration tab of the host then advanced settings under hardware.

[ollixy]

It says "This host does not support passthrough-configuration" there.

[ollixy]

It's solved now: I had to add a memory module to the controller, now everything runs stable in V4. It seems the SA P212 "zero memory controller" version is not stable in V4, though it's not mentioned in the HCL and it runs in V3.5.

[aneeser]

is it possible, that maybee my problem with vmdirectpath / passtrough is solved with adding memory to my p212 controller?

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1393891#1393891

or is it better to use another controller with my lto3 SAS Tape for a stable working with vmdirectpath?

thanks a lot for any help!

Allen

[ollixy]

Sorry but I don't think so anymore. See here: http://communities.vmware.com/message/1394422#1394422

Everything seems to be open again