A thought popped into my head that perhaps the fibre channel (FC) connection was being killed during the shutdown of the host and not coming up in time during startup. It was now time for some lunch so I took a break and did my usual when facing a technical problem and just read the daily news and let my mind do it’s thing.
At this point I had a stack of information, had done a test reboot and again gathered logs etc after that with the host in a bad state (datastores missing, path selection changed back to Most Recently Used or MRU).īelow are some example screenshots taken from the HPE iLO connection during a reboot – I had previously opened cases and neither could provide an answer to this problem. I started by taking screenshots and log files of everything – host setup, SAN, network etc so I had all the information required in case I needed to open a case with VMware or HPE.
VMWARE ESXI 6.7 SLOW BOOT ISSUE DRIVERS
Having updated the BIOS, firmware and drivers along with installing the latest updates for ESXi 5.5 I was ready to start my troubleshooting.
The switch modules in both datacenters connect back into Cisco Nexus 5596UP switches. When I looked into the problem the only difference I could find between the blade chassis was that we had HPE Virtual Connect (VC) modules in DC2 and Cisco B22 Nexus modules in DC1. The strange thing was that one of these blades would boot normally if moved to the other datacenter. As you can imagine this isn’t exactly ideal and I was most frustrated. In one of them (DC1) however my Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) BL460c blade servers running VMware ESXi took literally hours to reboot or startup/shutdown. I have two datacenters which are more or less identical in their setup. It’s really bothered me for a long time but I’ve just been tied up with other projects so it remained. I finally got round to looking at a problem which has existed in one of my datacenters for I guess a few years now.