Knowledge Base

Summaries and Symptoms

• SRM creates large number of transient targets. The iSCSI daemon remembers the targets that were discovered (but not present now) and issues input/output controls (ioctls) to get the kernel driver to connect to these targets. Because the targets are no longer present, the ioctls fail. On ESXi, this results in a large number of simultaneous opens to /dev/vmkiscsictl. When the number of simultaneous opens exceeds 32, valid targets do not get discovered.
  
  To fix this issue, the limit of simultaneous opens to /dev/vmkiscsictl is changed to 256. Absent targets are also removed from the iSCSI daemon target list.
  
  Symptoms seen without this patch: Snapshot LUNs on an array are not found during SRM recovery.

Deployment Considerations

None beyond the required patch bundles and reboot information listed in the table, above.

Patch Download and Installation

See the VMware Update Manager Administration Guide for instructions on using Update Manager to download and install patches to automatically update ESX Server 3.5 hosts.

To update ESX Server 3.5 hosts when not using Update Manager, download the most recent patch bundle from http://www.vmware.com/download/vi/vi3_patches_35.html and install the bundle using esxupdate from the command line of the host. For more information, see the ESX Server 3 Patch Management Guide.