Another woes with HP hardware recently which cost longer downtime to our customer production site. This latest issue related to new patch deployed by HP and caused SAN connectivity issue not only to ESX cluster servers (3.5 U3) but also happened to number of physical blade servers running WIN2K3 operating system.

From VMware Tech Support :

• Please check with your storage vendor since your vmhba cant see the lun

From HP

• Our SAN Eva was running fine
• Other servers can connect to SAN without issue (False)
• This is because ESX not patch to U4 (False) since one ESX 3.5 U4 outside cluster having same issue
• VMware Tech know nothing about my customer environment (False) because they know better than you.

From Me

• Hey HP! your blade cant scan any LUN or SAN switch from Qlogic HBA (Which is True!)

When I diagnose the logs gathered from ESX, found out the day when HP patch their SAN, out of sudden the SAN connection was terminated 15 minutes before ESX been powered-off which is something not right!

BTW, after more than 24 hours hard fought with HP, they did reboot the SAN and I think they also did something with their SAN configuration though they don’t want to admit it and after that all ESX servers now can see the LUN without issue.
To HP, how many time my customer have to be suffered because of your patch. Yes we knew your patch is compatible with U4, but have you check that all previous ESX version need to be patched or upgraded to U4 first before you can apply your precious patch? Better next time you check with your own VMware Team.

Note : All this issue related to HP patch irregardless whether it’s SAN storage, switch, blade enclosure or blade server.
ariyossss