vSphere 6.0 Storage Features Part 6: action_OnRetryErrors

In vSphere 6.0, an improvement has been made to how we handle I/O issues, such as flaky drivers, misbehaving firmware, dropped frames, fabric disruption, dodgy array firmware, and so on which can cause I/O failures. The issue is that, previously, we continually retry these sorts of I/O errors, which can lead to all sorts of additional problems. In this release we are changing our behaviour for marking a path dead.

Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) Deep-Dive – Part 4

In this post, I want to look at some fail-over and load balancing specific to ALUA (Asymmetric Logical Unit Access) arrays. In PSA part 3, we took a look at the different Path Selection Plugins (PSP), but for the most part these were discussed in the context of Active/Active arrays (where the LUN is available on all paths to the array) and Active/Passive arrays (where the LUN is owned by one controller on the array, and is only visible on the paths to that controller). ALUA provides a standard way for discovering and managing multiple paths to LUNs. Prior to…

Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) Deep-Dive – Part 3

So far in this series, we have looked at the Pluggable Storage Architecture (PSA) and MPPs (Multipath Plugins). We have delved into the Native Multipath Plugin (NMP), and had a look at its sub-plugins, the Storage Array Type Plugin (SATP) and Path Selection Plugin (PSP). We have seen how the PSA selects an MPP, and if that MPP is the NMP, how the NMP selects an SATP and PSP. Note – if you are having trouble following all the acronyms, you are not the first. There is a glossary at the end of the first blog post. And if we…