Troubleshooting storage issues when using VMware products

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

When using storage hardware in a virtualized environment, it is very important that this hardware remains in a healthy state, as it is the backbone of your environment. Without reliable storage, a virtualized environment can experience erratic behavior or even a catastrophic failure. This article attempts to point you in the right direction when experiencing any of these issues:

• Slow performance
• Unpredictable failures
• Disk corruption, or virtual machine corruption
• Alerts or alarms being received
• Need to know best practices on how to properly set up and maintain an environment
• Not enough storage space to install required resources

Resolution

To maintain a healthy environment and troubleshoot the above issues, VMware recommends the following resources and articles.

Best practices and Informational

• Minimum required permissions for Storage VMotion (1011345)
• Tuning ESXi/ESX for better storage performance by modifying the maximum I/O block size (1003469)
• Microsoft Clustering on VMware vSphere: Guidelines for Supported Configurations (1037959)
• Testing virtual machine storage I/O performance in VMware ESX and ESXi (1006821)
• Understanding virtual machine snapshots in VMware ESX (1015180)
• Considerations for using software iSCSI port binding in ESX/ESXi (2038869)

How to

• Changing a LUN to use a different Path Selection Policy (PSP) (1036189)
• Determining Network/Storage firmware and driver version in ESXi (1027206)

Storage vMotion issues

• Using Storage vMotion to migrate a virtual machine with many disks timeout (1010045)

Snapshot issues

• Consolidating snapshots (1007849)
• Taking a snapshot with virtual machine memory stuns the virtual machine while the memory is written to disk (1013163)
• Unable to use Snapshots or perform a backup on virtual machines configured with bus-sharing (1006392)

Local storage issues

• Troubleshooting poor local storage controller performance (1007688)

Microsoft Clustering issues

• Microsoft Cluster Service (MSCS) support on ESXi/ESX (1004617)
• ESXi/ESX hosts hosting passive MSCS nodes with RDM LUNs may take a long time to boot (1016106)

Storage arrays

• "state in doubt; requested fast path state update" error in ESXi (1022026)
• Physical drive failure on a storage array (1003499)
• You cannot see some or all storage devices in VMware vCenter Server or VirtualCenter (1016222)
• Unable to mount NFS datastore from NetApp storage array due to incorrect configuration (1008591)
• Troubleshooting fibre channel storage connectivity (1003680)
• ESX hosts in APD may appear Not Responding in vCenter Server (1030980)
• Permanent Device Loss (PDL) and All-Paths-Down (APD) in vSphere 5.0 (2004684)
• Identifying shared storage issues with ESX or ESXi (1003659)
• ESXi/ESX hosts might experience read performance issues with certain storage arrays (1002598)

General Storage troubleshooting

• Troubleshooting the Add Storage Wizard error: Unable read partition information from this disk error (1008886)
• Lost or degraded connectivity to storage device (1009553)
• Linux based file systems become read-only (51306)
• Resolving the CID mismatch error: The parent virtual disk has been modified since the child was created (1007969)
• Troubleshooting ESXi connectivity to iSCSI arrays using software initiators (1003952)

General storage resources

• VMware product documentation at the VMware Documentation site
• Ensure your hardware is compatible and at the proper firmware level by checking the VMware Compatibility Guide
• Discuss your issue with others who may have experience the same issue at Broadcom Communities
• In depth detail and white papers at the VMware Technical Resource Center
• Collecting diagnostic information for VMware products (1008524)
• Location of log files for VMware products (1021806)