Heads Up! EMC VNXe & iSCSI issue

Hmm, it seems to be the week that’s in it for storage issues. After publishing the DELL EQL & VMFS issue earlier this week, I have now been given a heads-up on an EMC VNXe & iSCSI issue. The symptoms are ESXi hosts being unable to boot from an iSCSI LUN on the VNXe or ESXi hosts losing connectivity to iSCSI datastores.

This issue only seems to affect dual storage processor (SP) VNXe systems only. The issue does not occur on single SP VNXe systems. EMC has detailed the issue in KB 169041. However you will need a valid EMC account login to access the details. As per the KB:

A hotfix is available from EMC Engineering which can be applied to VNXe Operating Environment version MR4_SP1 (2.4.1.21171). The hotfix installation requires storage processors to be rebooted one at a time. There may be disruption in services during the failover/failback of services.

 To obtain this hotfix, contact the EMC Customer Support Center or your service representative.

If you have a dual SP VNXe and use iSCSI to present storage to your ESXi hosts, you need to get this hotfix.

3 Replies to “Heads Up! EMC VNXe & iSCSI issue”

  1. In the KB under cause it says

    “If a network interface is configured, but it is offline on either SP, it enters a state in which the other SP can begin generating a “unicast packet storm.” The issue will occur only if an SP has two different logical interfaces configured in the same VLAN (both interfaces in the same “broadcast domain”) and one of the interfaces goes offline. When this happens, the peer SP is placed in a packet forwarding mode and it attempts to forward packets to and from the SP with the interface that is down.”

    In our case we each of the 2 interfaces in their respective SPs is on a different VLAN so the way I read this the hotfix application requirement is configuration dependent,

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