I have an issue in my testing environment where I have 3 ESXi 4.1 Update 2 hosts with 2 single port fibre card installed and 1 ESX4.0 host with 1 single port fibre card installed, connected to the SAN in the manner outlined in the graphic.
The 3 ESXi 4.1 hosts are connected in the same manner as the 4.0 host but the extra hba is connected to the other SAN switch. I hope this makes sense, please let me know if it doesn’t!
When adding a LUN as VMFS Datastore to any of the ESXi4.1 hosts it will add no problems regardless of which controller the LUN is using as its preferred path. The SAN by the way is a DS3500, with dual controllers A and B.
There are two HOST groups created on the SAN, 1 for the 3 ESXi 4.1 hosts and 1 with the single ESX4.0 host.
My problem is adding a VMFS Datastore to the ESX 4.0, when the LUN is using Controller B as its path, the Datastore creation fails at the point where it is creating the store. i.e the HOST can see the LUN and it is available for selection with adding storage to the host. When adding the storage to the host and the LUN path is controller B the GUI add wizard is slow and eventually fails at the creating VMFS partition step.
If however the LUN path is via controller A the add storage wizard is snappy and the Datastore is created successfully.
I’m pretty sure my zoning is correct because the HOST can actually see the LUN, it just errors out when adding as a Datastore.
Is my problem the fact that ESX4.0 host only has the one hba? I’m not so sure about this because I have another environment where this is not an issue.
Cheers
David
