ESX Server 3.0.2, Patch ESX-1002974: Fixes for SCSI Reservation Conflicts; Support for EMC Invista

Symptoms

• When synchronous commands such as SCSI Reserve/ Release are retried by the VMkernel storage stack, the path information does not get updated. If a failover happens when SCSI Reserve/ Release are retried, SCSI Reserve/Release will be issued on a redundant path, and I/Os issued on the active path will complete with SCSI Reservation conflicts. An error message similar to the following might be displayed in /var/log/vmkernel :

  Oct 25 15:03:26 [root@root] vmkernel: 0:00:28:27.433 cpu2:1040)WARNING: SCSI: 5524: Failing I/O due to too many reservation conflicts
  
  
• The ESX Server host stops responding when EMC Invista Brocade is rebooted.
• When booting from SAN, where there are multiple paths to the boot LUN, if the boot LUN disappears from the primary path (for example, due to a hardware failure) the service console might not fail-over to the secondary path and goes read only.

Deployment Considerations

Download Instructions

Download and verify the patch bundle as follows:

1. Download patch ESX-1002974 from http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/vi3_patches.html .

2. Log in to the ESX Server service console as root.

3. Create a local depot directory.

# mkdir -p /var/updates

Note: VMware recommends that you use the updates directory.

4. Change your working directory to /var/updates.

# cd /var/updates

5. Download the tar file into the /var/updates directory.

7. Extract the compressed tar archive:

# tar -xvzf ESX-1002974.tgz

8. Change to the newly created directory, /var/updates/ESX-1002974:

# cd ESX-1002974

Installation Instructions

Note: All virtual machines on the host must be either shut down or migrated using VMotion before applying the patch. A reboot of the ESX Server host is required after applying this patch.

After you download and extract the archive, and if you are in the directory that you previously created, use the following command to install the update:

# esxupdate update

To run esxupdate from a different directory, you must specify the bundle path in the command:

# esxupdate -r file://<directory>/ESX-1002974 update

For example, if the host is called depot:

# esxupdate -r file:///depot/var/updates/ESX-1002974 update

During the update process, logs appear on the terminal. You can specify the verbosity of esxupdate logs by using the -v option as shown below.

# esxupdate -v 10 file://<directory>/ESX-1002974 update

For more information how to use esxupdate, see the Patch Management for ESX Server 3 tech note at http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx3_esxupdate.pdf .