As many of us rejoiced at the release of VSAN 6.2 that came with vSphere 6 Update 2…those of us running DELL PERC based storage controllers where quickly warned of a potential issues and where told to not upgrade. VMwareKB 2144614 referenced these issues and stated that the PERC H730 and FD332 found in DELL Server platforms where not certified for VSAN 6.2 pending onging investigations. The storage controllers that where impacted are listed below.
- Dell PERC H730 (VCG entry)
- Dell PERC H730P (VCG entry)
- Dell PERC H730 mini (VCG entries: 34859 and 34860)
- Dell PERC H730P mini (VCG entries: 34857 and 34858)
- Dell FD332-PERC – Single ROC (VCG entry)
- Dell FD332-PERC – Dual ROC (VCG entry)
This impacted me as we have the FD332 Dual ROC in our production FX2s with VSAN 6.1 and a test bed with VSAN 6.2. With the KB initially saying No ETA I sat and waited like others impacted to have the controllers certified. Late last week however DELL and VMware finally released an updated FW driver for that PERC based which certifies the H730s and FD332s with VSAN 6.2.
Before this update if you looked at the VSAN Health Monitor you would have seen a Warning next to the VMware Certified check and official driver support.
As well as upgrading the controller drivers it’s also suggested that you make the following changes on each host in the cluster which adds two new VSAN IO timeout settings. No reboot is required after applying the advanced config and the command is persistent.
esxcfg-advcfg -s 100000 /LSOM/diskIoTimeout
esxcfg-advcfg -s 4 /LSOM/diskIoRetryFactor
Once the driver has been upgraded you should see all green in the VSAN Health Checks as shown below with the up to date driver info.
This is all part of the fun and games of using your own components for VSAN, but I still believe it’s a huge positive to be able to cater a design for specific use cases with specific hardware. In talking with various people within VMware and DELL (as it related to this and previous PERC driver issues) it’s apparent that both parties need to communicate better and go through much better QA before updating drivers and firmware releases however this is not only something that effects VMware and DELL and not only for storage drivers…it’s a common issues throughout the industry and it not only impacts VMware VSAN with every vendor having issues at some point.
Better safe than sorry here and well done on VMware and DELL on getting the PERC certified without too much delay.
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