I am running 16 ESXi blades with Qlogic FC mezzanine cards. Performance have been greate up to Build Number:
153840 dated March 20, 2009. After upgrading to Build Number: 153875, the qlogic module took more than 30 mins to load and all subsequet modules loaded very, very slowly. I have tried every build since March 20th and they all result in very slow boot times and slow FC performance with a lot of timeouts.
Today, I updated to the latest HP BIOS for server, network cards, Qlogic and iLO. And I had no luck. Does anyone have any sugestions?
Thank you,
do you use virtual connect and if so what version are you using ?
It does seem odd that a new build would have such an impact on the FC.
I would be tempted to get checks done on the whole path from FC to LUN.
Do you have a large amount of LUNS that need to be scanned at boot? If not, you can adjust the default scan to a smaller more suitable number in order to ease the LUN discovery part of the boot.
How many paths do you have from your chassis FC switches (I'm guessing you are using c7000s ?) BTW, you shouldn't have more than 4 ESX hosts in one chassis if you use HA.
Do you have 2 switches? if so, are they both functioning correctly? Are they active/active or have you had a failover?
I guess, the easy way to check, would be to but a blade into maintenance mode, shut it down, swap the 2 SAS drives for new ones and rebuild it with an older image.
Very strange. There was QLogic driver update in last patches, but my BL460c's with QLogic HBAs work as well as before.
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VMware vExpert '2009
No, everything else is functioning properly. I have other blades running older builds of ESXi and they boot up fine. The problem is when I upgrade to the latest patch!.
do you use virtual connect and if so what version are you using ?