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

Later this year I’ll be looking at moving our VMware environment across to a EMC CX4 system. I saw these posted before somewhere but could not remember who did it,  so I had to search for them all over again.  I’m personally interested in the Clariion document but the following links may come in handy for anyone else that is using Vmware on the Symmetrix or Celerra ranges.

These were all found using EMC’s documentation search which I will be adding to my favourites for future use.

TechBook: VMware ESX Server Using EMC Celerra Storage Systems Solutions Guide
TechBook: VMware ESX Server Using EMC CLARiiON Storage Systems Solutions Guide
TechBook: VMware ESX Server using EMC Symmetrix Storage Systems Solutions Guide

For my own personal reference,  I found some interesting documents on using EMC and QLogic HBA’s in both a Linux (ESX) and Windows environment.  These will come in handy as we use HP based Qlogic HBA’s and EMC storage,  maybe someone else may find them useful. 

** Please note that these documents appear to relate to a specific driver,  please check before using the content within **

EMC Fibre Channel and ISCSI with QLogic Host Bus Adapters in the Windows Environment
EMC Fibre Channel with QLogic Host Bus Adapters for the Linux Environment 

General EMC, QLogic, Storage