Heads up ! – EMC PowerPath/VE 5.9.1 & VMware ESXi 5.x potential disruption

It’s HEADS UP! time again, as usual courtesy of an EMC TA bulletin.

‘VMware ESXI hosts may become unresponsive after adding or removing LUNs when running PowerPath/VE 5.9.1’

This doesn’t sound like a particulalry fun way to start or end your day so read on if you want to avoid it;

Affected Versions;

• ESXI 5.1 & ESXi 5.5
• Powerpath/VE 5.9.1                         (must be this version, earlier releases are not affected)

It seems there’s exists a potential for a deadlock to be introduced during the ‘rescanning’ task after LUN changes are made to ESXi hosts. The PowerPath process handling the change expects a response from the host daemon (hostd) in a specific time. Unfortunately, resources are starved and the response doesn’t come. A deadlock ensues, followed closely by many emails from your vCenter server, and then the phones start ringing….. You get the picture.

Full Bulletin here

Check your PowerPath version with ESXCli on host;

Or remote via PowerCLI;

Of course you can ‘feed’ or loop in the hostnames, but they should be consistent 🙂 ..and yes I know this host is a little off, it’s a lab host !

This issue is fixed in PowerPath 5.9/VE SP1 P02 or later so download away (after doing your pre-req checks)

 PowerPath/VE 5.9.1.1 SW install Bundle

Even better, get cracking on the cool PowerPath Virtual Appliance   (I have a blog coming on installing this soon)

Or get your reading glasses on, brew a coffee and check out the documentation;

PowerPath-VE-for-VMware-orama

Go at it.