Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Resolved: Slow booting of ESXi 5.0 when iSCSI is configured

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My colleague Cormac posted an article about this already, but I figured it was important enough to rehash some of content. As many of you have experienced there was an issue with ESXi 5.0 in iSCSI environments. Booting would take a fair amount of time due to the increase of the amount of retries in the case creating a connection to the array would fail.

This is what the log file would typically look like:

iscsid: cannot make a connection to 192.168.1.20:3260 (101,Network is unreachable)
iscsid: Notice: Reclaimed Channel (H34 T0 C1 oid=3)
iscsid: session login failed with error 4,retryCount=3
iscsid: Login Target Failed: iqn.1984-05.com.dell:powervault.md3000i.6002219000a14a2b00000000495e2886 if=iscsi_vmk@vmk8 addr=192.168.1.20:3260 (TPGT:1 ISID:0xf) err=4
iscsid: Login Failed: iqn.1984-05.com.dell:powervault.md3000i.6002219000a14a2b00000000495e2886 if=iscsi_vmk@vmk8 addr=192.168.1.20:3260 (TPGT:1 ISID:0xf) Reason: 00040000 (Initiator Connection Failure)

This is explained in KB 2007108 which also contains the download link. Make sure to download it and update your environment if you are running iSCSI.

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Comments

  2. That patch was not a minute to soon. I just configured a small esxi5 sulotion. 2 hostes and à Dell MD3200i. It took 45 min to boot. After the patch: >5 min

    • You might check your config then though as you should only get the delay when LUNs become unavailable … If that is the case in a new setup, maybe you got authentication issues ?

  3. Duncan,
    Appreciate ALL the great post you provide. Your post provide an insight to VMware most of us do not have. I’m a HUGE fan of VMware, definitely a game changer in the datacenter. In the past I never had a concern about the “quality” of a new release. I just “knew” it would be rock solid, it always has been. Look at going from esx2 to 3 with HA and DRS – it just worked perfectly. Regrettably I can not say I feel the same at this point. iSCSI is a major SAN protocol. I don’t see how we missed this issue in beta, RC testing? If you look at the post http://communities.vmware.com/message/1837757#1837757 this is across many storage vendors and is not an isolated incident. Your feedback is appreciated.

    Tom Miller

  4. What strikes me more is the fact that majore ‘issues’ always seem to be iscsi related. I remember a big bug back in ESX 3.5 days. You’d hope people learn 🙂

  5. We have 4 hosts with Hardware ISCSI HBA’s — no software HBA’s configured (in vmware at least…in the guests yes) upgraded from ESX 4 to ESXi5 and having ~30 minute boot times….these hosts have a lot of targets (~10) and two discovery targets….not sure if trying the persistant target approach would improve things, but it seems to hang for an extended period on loading qlogic 4xxx module….any advice?

    Thanks!