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Data corruption when using VMware ESXi 5.x with VAAI hardware accelerated VMFS data movement enabled on IBM System Storage DCS3700, DS3512, and DS3524 Storage Controllers (2039608)

Symptoms

  • You experience data corruption when using VMware ESXi 5.x with VAAI hardware accelerated VMFS data movement enabled on these IBM System Storage Controllers:

    • DCS3700, DS3512, and DS3524 with firmware version 7.83.xx.xx

  • Data corruption occurs when XCOPY is utilized to improve performance with these operations:

    • Storage vMotion
    • virtual machine cloning
    • virtual machine snapshots
    • deploying from a virtual machine template

  • A virtual machine stops during boot with the message:

    A disk read error occurred
    press Ctrl_Alt_Sel to restart

  • A virtual machine fails with a Windows blue screen error (BSOD) with the message:

    PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA

  • A virtual machine fails to boot with the message:

    The file or directory D:\Windows\System32 is corrupt and unreadable. Please run the Chkdsk utility.

Resolution

This is not a VMware issue.

IBM has resolved this issue in the 7.83.27.00 release and later of the System Storage controller firmware.

For more information, see these IBM articles:

To work around this issue, disable the portion of VAAI on the vSphere server that utilizes XCOPY on the storage controller by running the command:

esxcfg-advcfg -s 0 /DataMover/HardwareAcceleratedMove

This disables only hardware acceleration of these operations; the basic operations still function normally. Once the hardware acceleration is disabled, the possibility of data corruption from this issue is eliminated.

Note: This information is from IBM's article on this issue. For the most up-to-date information, see the original article.

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