Tuesday, January 26, 2016

VM IO stalls on HP DL360 G7 ESXi 5.5.0 2403361 with a HP Smart Array p410 and a spare drive



We have a product that is very sensitive to network issues. So much so that it logs an error whenever it goes 5 seconds without communication. Just so happened that we started logging this error after we moved that product to a HP DL360 G7 running on ESXi 5.5. We first went down the development route to track down the issue because we were doing load testing on that product at the time.

At some point, we noticed these errors even when the system was not under load. We could see these perfectly timed latency spikes at the same time as we had those errors. Then we shifted our focus to system/infrastructure.

This is what our datastore latency looked like:



Then we discovered the strangest thing. We had this latency even when no VMs were running. We configured a second system just like the first to rule out the hardware. Sure enough, both systems had the problem.

I started juggling drivers. I was quick to load new drivers and firmware so that felt like a good place to start. I slowly walked the storage controller driver backwards until the issue went away. I settled on this driver:

Type: Driver - Storage Controller
Version:    5.5.0.60-1(11 Jun 2014)
Operating System(s):    VMware vSphere 5.5
File name:  scsi-hpsa-5.5.0.60-1OEM.550.0.0.1331820.x86_64.vib (65 KB)

  esxcli software vib install -v file:/tmp/scsi-hpsa-5.5.0.60-1OEM.550.0.0.1331820.x86_64.vib --force --no-sig-check --maintenance-mode

I didn’t like this as a solution because I had a new storage controller firmware with a very old storage controller driver. I found another DL360 G7 that was configured by someone else for another project and it was running good. They didn’t update anything. Just loaded the ESXi DVD and ran with it.

I came to the conclusion that it had a valid firmware/driver combination. I like that setup better than what I had so that became the recommended deployment. Don’t update the firmware and use the DVD so you don’t have to mess with drivers.

Then our next deployment that used that configuration and the issue resurfaced. After ruling out some other variables that could have impacted the results, I ended up rolling the driver back to fix it.


After pinning the driver down, I went hunting for more information on it. Searching for latency issue with storage gives you all kinds of useless results. I was hopeful that searching for the driver would lead me to some interesting discussions.





I ended up with an answer to my issue in that last link. But there were a lot of other issues
In summary, HPSA driver later than v60 driving a HP Smart Array p410 controller of any firmware vintage with a spare drive configured. The spare drive configuration seems to cause an i/o back-feed into the driver blowing it up at irregular intervals. This issue will not surface unless a spare drive is configured on the array controller.

At the time of writing this, the v114 driver also does not fix the issue.





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