Virtual machines may experience slowness with DELL 13G servers running on HBA 330 IO Controller

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Symptoms:
A virtual machine may experience higher latency or diminished performance on certain 13G PowerEdge servers using HBA330 IO Controller with firmware version 16.17.00.03.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 6.7
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5

Cause

This issue occurs because under certain corner cases on Dell 13G server platforms such as R730, R630, R430 or other 13G PowerEdge Servers, a virtual machine may experience higher latency or diminished performance.

Note: This is observed only if the PowerEdge 13G server is running with HBA330 IO controller and firmware version is FW 16.17.00.03.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, upgrade to the latest supported firmware version 16.17.00.05.

Note: Currently, the fix is only supported for ESXi 6.5 Update 3, ESXi 6.7 Update 2 & Update 3.

Workaround:
To work around this issue:

VMware and DellEMC jointly recommends not to upgrade to firmware version 16.17.00.03 if you are running 13G server platforms.