{"id":201,"date":"2013-03-11T15:19:00","date_gmt":"2013-03-11T15:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/atumvirtwordpress.azurewebsites.net\/?p=201"},"modified":"2013-03-11T15:19:00","modified_gmt":"2013-03-11T15:19:00","slug":"yet-another-cx-4-vaai-with-vsphere-5-x-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/2013\/03\/yet-another-cx-4-vaai-with-vsphere-5-x-post\/","title":{"rendered":"Yet Another CX-4 \/ VAAI With vSphere 5.x Post"},"content":{"rendered":"

Long have I known about the problems <\/a>of upgrading from vSphere 4 to vSphere 5<\/a> when it came to VAAI. \u00a0Long had I heard the discussion and seen the blog posts about who would support what. \u00a0I even made sure to make my voice heard on the subject. \u00a0It really hadn’t been of terrible concern – things were running just fine. \u00a0Until they weren’t.<\/p>\n

When Good Enough Goes Bad<\/h3>\n

My recent adventures with VMware Converter to create test VMs had left me with a rather sour taste in my mouth. \u00a0There were periods of the process when my newly created LUNs, consisting of a pool of over 50 disks – about half high-performance FC and half SATA – that the performance just wasn’t right. \u00a0Something…something was off. \u00a0I couldn’t put my finger on it, but the drives were ripping along, then all of the sudden things would go silent. \u00a0No CPU usage on the VM. \u00a0Little to no disk activity in the pool or from the host…but the VM was just stuck.<\/p>\n

I connected to one of the hosts directly and noticed a warning about the volume being locked. \u00a0Some searching lead me down the path of troubleshooting, and I found only more problems.<\/p>\n

As it turns out, we had some configuration issues with about half of the hosts in one cluster. \u00a0Some hosts were using Failover mode 1, others were using Failover mode 4 (ALUA). \u00a0VAAI on the CX4 requires failover mode 4. \u00a0With vSphere 5, EMC finally decided to support VAAI in October 2012. \u00a0Through a series of “maintenance mode” operations, we were able to set all hosts to ALUA, but still, Hardware Acceleration appeared “Unsupported” on most hosts.<\/p>\n

PowerPath\/VE<\/h3>\n
Years ago we had purchased PowerPath\/VE, but due to the cost we decided not to continue adding it to our standard build. \u00a0For those original hosts, however, we never uninstalled it (since, hey, we still had licenses, so why not?). \u00a0When vCenter necessitated a server rebuild, the PowerPath licensing server wasn’t moved to the new server and it was operating unlicensed. \u00a0Which…shouldn’t be a problem…right? \u00a0Perhaps. \u00a0Being sticklers for configuration consistency, we wanted to make sure that all hosts had the same multipathing. \u00a0We removed PowerPath from our AutoDeploy image profile and from the physical hosts and removed the claim rules<\/a>. \u00a0Still, hardware acceleration was “Unknown” on some hosts. \u00a0Now what?<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

Storage Claim Rules in Host Profile<\/h3>\n
Host Profile, eat your heart out. \u00a0As it turns out, we needed to add a claim rule (65431) for VMW_VAAIP_CX and VAAI_FILTER for DGC, otherwise the modules weren’t loading. \u00a0Why this is the case isn’t quite clear for me, but if any readers care to enlighten me, I’d appreciate it.<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n

Results<\/h3>\n
So far, I haven’t experienced the same “storage locking” issue, but time will tell. \u00a0Hopefully this gremlin has been put to bed and we’ll revise our processes in the future to ensure all hosts are configured in a consistent manner.<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Long have I known about the problems of upgrading from vSphere 4 to vSphere 5 when it came to VAAI. \u00a0Long had I heard the discussion and seen the blog posts about who would support what. \u00a0I even made sure to make my voice heard on the subject. \u00a0It really hadn’t been of terrible concern […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/avtempwp.azurewebsites.net\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}