VirtualPro

I’ve just finished a piece of work upgrading a few hosts to ESX 3.5 Update 4 using the ESX deployment appliance.  As part of the upgrade I install version 8.2.0 of the HP management agents for ESX. Upon completion of the install I realised that I could not see the Qlogic HBA’s within the Insight Manager home page.

Upon investigation it appears that HP have removed the libraries from their software from version 8.0.0 onwards.  Now ideally I would have installed the libraries before installing HP Insight Manager as indicated by Arnim Van Lieshout in his great HP agent upgrade script post.  In my case I had already done the install, so in order to see the HBA’s and the connected HP Storage, I had to carry out the following steps.

I downloaded the relevant Qlogic API library for ESX 3.5 U4 from the following site  
http://support.qlogic.com/support/oem_product_detail_vmware.asp

I created a temporary folder in the /tmp partition called qlogiclib

I unzipped the contents and copied it over to the new folder using WinSCP.

I logged on to the service console and ran the following commands to stop the HP agents.

service hpsmhd stop and service hpasm stop

I then navigated to the /tmp/qlogiclib folder and ran the command ./Install.sh

I then ran the following commands in the order shown below to restart the HP agents.

service hpsmhd start and service hpasm start

To check if it worked I navigated to https://hostname:2381 and checked for the external storage connections entry under the storage section on the home page.

Finally I deleted the /tmp/qlogiclib folder as it was no longer required.

Now the same steps carried out with vSphere ESX 4 does not have the desired effect.  Even though you can use the HBA test script located in the Qlogic API library they will not show up in HP Insight manager (Much to my annoyance).  When I eventually find a solution I will of course provide an update.

ESX, VMware, vSphere esx 3.5, QLogic

I subscribe to a large number of virtualisation feeds and the primary reason is that I never fail to learn something new every single day.

I came across a blog entry by the excellent Duncan Epping over at Yellow Bricks about VMFS Heap size configuration.  I was not previously aware of this setting because we have 3.0.x in our environment and our HP MSA storage only support 3.6Gb fully populated so this scenario would never come up.  I will however be keeping this in mind when designing our new ESX 3.5 environment.  We seem to be utilising bigger hosts all the time and when you add in a new EMC Clariion CX4, the potential for one host to be accessing more than 4TB of open VMDKs goes up.

was talking to a fellow consultant today. He ran into the following error messages at one of his customer sites:

vmkernel: 8:18:59:58.640 cpu2:1410)WARNING: Heap: 1370: Heap_Align(vmfs3, 4096/4096 bytes, 4 align) failed. caller: 0×8fdbd0
vmkernel: 8:18:59:58.640 cpu2:1410)WARNING: Heap: 1266: Heap vmfs3: Maximum allowed growth (24) too small for size (8192)

During the conversation I knew I’d seen this problem before. But the problem that I witnessed was related to a high threshold value in Vizioncore vFoglight. I knew it was possible to change the setting:

1. Open vCenter, and click a specific host
2. Click on the “Configurations” tab
3. Click on Advanced Settings, VMFS3
4. Change the value of “VMFS3.MaxHeapSizeMB”

 

The default value is 16MB, this allows for a maximum of 4TB of open vmdk’s on a single host. The max setting is 128MB which allows for a maximum of 32TB of open vmdk’s on a single host. Keep this in mind when designing your environment.

Keep in mind that this is ESX 3.5 only, you can’t change the heap size in ESX 3.0.x.

ESX, VMware esx, esx 3.5, VMware