I wanted to cover off a couple of important updates in this post relating to the DELL PERC storage controller Firmware and software drivers as well as an important new release of ESXi 6.0 that addresses a couple of issues with VSAN and also fixes to more VMXNET3 problems which seem to keep popping up. Read further below for the ESXi fixes but firstly a couple of weeks ago I posted about the new certified driver updates for the DELL PERC based storage controllers that VMware released for VSAN 6.2. This driver was only half of the fix as DELL also released new Firmware for most of the PERC based controllers 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)
It’s important to match the PERC Firmware with the updated driver from VMware as together they protect against the LSI issues mentioned here. The workaround after the driver has been installed is just that and it requires the FW upgrade to be fully protected. As shown below you want to be on at least version 25.4.0.0015.
Side note: While you are at it looking at the DELL Drivers and Download site you should also consider upgrading to the latest iDRAC Firmware and any other component that contains fixes to issues that could impact you.
Just on that new VMware driver…even if you are running earlier versions of VSAN with the Health Checker if you update the HCL database and run a health check you will see a warning against PERC FW Controller Driver versions prior to lsi_mr3 (6.903.85.00-1OEM.600.0.0.2768847) as shown below.
New ESXi 6.0 Update 2 Build VSAN Fixes:
Last week VMware released ESXi 6.0 Build 3825889 that addressed a couple of big issues relating to VSAN datastore updates and also a bad VMXNET3 PSOD issue. Of most importance to me looking to upgrade existing VSAN 6.1 clusters to VSAN 6.2 there was an issue with CBT enabled VMs when upgrading the VSAN filesystem from 2.0 to 3.0.
Attempts to upgrade a Virtual SAN cluster On-Disk format version from version 2.0 to 3.0 fails when you Power On CBT-enabled VMs. Also, CBT-enabled VMs from a non-owning host might fail due to on-disk lock contention on the ctk files and you might experience the following issues:
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Deployment of multiple VMs from same CBT enabled template fail.
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VMs are powered off as snapshot consolidation fails.
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VM does not Power On if the hardware version is upgraded (for example, from 8 or 9 to 10) before registering the VM on a different host
So that’s not too cool specially if you are using Veeam or some other VDP based backup solution but glad there is a fix for that. Again I don’t get why or how these things slip through…but it seems like things haven’t improved too much when it comes to the QA of ESXi releases. But again, the relative turn around time to have these issues fixed seems to be somewhat acceptable.
As mentioned there are a few more significant fixes so when the time is right this update should be applied to existing ESXi 6.0 Update 2 installations.
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