Hi,
I've just installed and configured two new hosts for our environment, ESX13 & ESX14. They're identical IBM HS22 blade servers both with ESX 4.1 U1 installed.
In order to make sure everything was working correctly I powered off an existing VM and migrated it across to one of the new hosts, in the first instance ESX13. I powered on the VM and got to the Windows login where I enter credentials. It then sits with "applying user profile" on the screen and the blue circle just spinning away for a good 10 minutes. A little confused I reset the VM and the same thing happens. After much digging around I discover that the datastore latency from ESX13 to the datastore where this VM resides is huge.
With the VM still powered on and trying to login I VMotion it across to ESX14. On successful migration the VM comes to life and logs in to Windows. The latency can clearly be seen from the screenshot where I have included VM disk latency and datastore latency for both hosts. You can clearly see that the migration was just before 11:30.
The VM resides on a NetApp SAN which is connected via FC and accessible from both hosts.
Is there anything I can check as to what could be causing this 'host specfic' latency?
EDIT:
Just to add that both ESX hosts have two HBA's and are connected directly to the same fibre switches. Each switch then has two paths to the SAN, one to each controller, giving four paths to each host. The hosts are using Round Robin pathing policy and have been optimised for the NetApp SAN using the NetApp Virtual Storage Console plugin for vCenter.
EDIT2:
I've just migrated another VM from our other SAN (IBM DS3400 connected through the same Fibre Switches) to this host and get exactly the same behaviour. I've checked the Fibre Switch config and there's no differences between the ports for ESX13 & ESX14, so I'm really at a loss here. It's got to be an issue with the host or HBAs?