Hey guys,
I have a weird problem and it is like looking for a needle in a haystack.
I have two vSphere 5 hosts which are connected to IBM N-Series filer running Data Ontap 8.0.2. P3
We are using this environment to test Vmware View.
Sometimes a host loses connectivity to some of my 3 volumes. The volume shows up as inactive.
The other hosts appears to lose no access to the same volumes at the same time.
During all this I can still ping the filer or access a volume on the same filer from the same host.
The weird thing is it is not always necesarilly the same host or same volume that acts weird.
I logged a job with VMware and they basically said it is an issue with filer or networking.
I cannot find anything on the network side. The connection does not go down. Remember some of the volumes are still accessible.
I logged a job with IBM but they don't even bother getting back to me.
I decided to add a different filer in the mix. This time a netapp 2040.
At this stage I have two different filers connected to my two hosts.
The Netapp volumes show the same behaviour. It loses connectivity to some volumes but not all and not necessarilly from same host or same volume.
Now that I have two filers in the mix I lose connectivity to random volumes on both filers. And they don't necessarilly have a VM on them either.
They seem to flap a lot. Some of them come back after a few minutes. Looks like a game of ping pong.
During this time there are no issues with the hosts networking. There is no disconnect from vcenter and only VM that happens to sit on shared volume is affected.
Everything appeared to have been stable for a few days but when I deployed VMs with rapid cloning utility this morning it went all pear shape.
I have also witnessed this behaviour when deploying with Vmware View Connector or just migrating VM's to the filer's datastore.
This rules out the filer's in my opinion.
I also don't believe it is the switch as nothing shows up in the logs.
To me it seems host related and potentially vSphere 5 specific.
Our production environment is configured the same without any issues but that is running vSphere4.
Any ideas because I don't have a clue right now :-)