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Dell Open Manage 6.x causes disappearing datastores

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Mad props out to Tommy Trogden with @ www.vtexan.com for encouraging me to blog. 

I have many Dell customers out there so I wanted to share a bug I came across a little less than a year ago.  A very large Energy client of ours observed "rolling" datastores after rebooting esx 4.x hosts.  Since I hadn't seen this before so I was immediately suspect of environmental factors and used their lab to test the issue.  Using one of their production systems I removed their 3rd party components 1 by 1 and retested.  Turned out that when I uninstalled OMSA the "disappearing" datastores were not only present but they also stopped their "rolling presentation"....   


At this point I dialed Dell to let them know of the bug discovery. While they could not immediately reproduce the issue. I was able to display if for them while they shadowed.  Eventually Dell was able to reproduce the issue in their labs. While they agreed it was a bug they were unusually tight lipped about the information they did share with me. 

1) The issue is memory buffer related and should only with large luns/datastore counts. I suspect many paths to fewer luns would accomplish a similar affect. 

2) Can be mitigated by stopping dsm_om_shrsvc using the following command:  chkconfig  dsm_om_shrsvc off

3) My client chose to remove the OM product and allow VMware to notify hardware failures until the 7.0 release of OMSA which is the version Dell intends to correct the issue with.   

This should be the exception and not the rule and only seen in the  largest of clusters.  If you have any questions or are experiencing this issue don't hesitate to reach out to me -  This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

 

 

 

Blog 1 - Disable Autorescan Vcenter 4.x

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You can't, you won't, and you don't stop... Enterprise storage admins loathe the autoscan feature in VCenter 4.x + beyond.   If you have tens or hundreds of datastores and cluster sof 7 or so ESX hosts waiting for the rescans to complete can slow zoning reconfiguraitons, dirver updates or software implementations.  Using the following command you can stop and start this feature NON Disruptively as no service restarts are required! 

  1. Open the vSphere Client.
  2. Go to Administration > vCenter Server.
  3. Go to Settings > Advanced Settings.
  4. If the config.vpxd.filter.hostRescanFilter key is not available, add the key and set it to False.

* Further detail can be found @ http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1016873


 

 


 

   

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