Datastore connectivity issues

We have a shared datastore to provide global catalogs to our various ORG's in the vCloud.  For whatever reason several ESX hosts across mulitple clusters were reporting APD (all path's down) when trying to connect to this VNX NFS Export.  After putting those hosts into maintenance mode, everything seemed happy again.   We did quite a bit of digging, it turned out all servers had the same patch level, the NFS export seemed properly configured, we were stumped.  Looking on the Nexus 7k, we saw that one of the ports in the VNX portchannel had a low Rx Power -11.30 dBm, and 75414 CRC errors on RX.  Once we replaced the SFP & Fiber Optic Cable, everything is happy again.

Isilon NFS load balancing & vCD 1.5 (cloud director)

Recently setting up an Isilon with the new scale vCloud we spent alot of time discussing what options we had to load balance across the Isilon nodes. The recommended best practice is to statically setup a matrix of multiple datastores to the separate nodes individually. However, two unique items about this setup prevent this from being overly useful. Our Isilon is presented as one large storage pool that isn't subdivided. The way vCD works, it fills the first pool, then moves onto the second one. Knowing these two things vCD would fill the first datastore, but then never move onto the second one. I decided to just use Smart Connect Basic features that come with the Isilon. The ESX servers will then use DNS to dynamically connect to the separate Isilon nodes.

VMware Host Profiles giving errors about Path Selection Policy for naa and mpx devices

I am trying to use host profiles in a full NFS vCenter, no block level storage other than the local SSD disks for the ESXi 5 servers to boot from and some various emulated CDROM’s attached to some of the hosts. Because I don’t really care about the uniformity of my local storage I just want to ignore these errors and get a Green “Compliant” result for my cluster so I can fix the important issues. I tried going into Edit Profile and removing a lot of data from under Storage Configuration/PSA & NMP & iSCSI, but this led to more errors, such as below:

Failures Against Host Profile

Host state doesn’t match specification: device mpx.vmhba32:xx:xx:xx Path Selection Policy needs to be set to default for claiming SATP

Host state doesn’t match specification: device mpx.vmhba32:xx:xx:xx needs to be reset

To resolve the issue, you need to right click on the Actual storage profile under “Host Profiles” on the left hand side of the screen and choose “Enable/Disable Profile Configuration…”

Then unselect items from here such as PSA device configuration and whatever else causing you unnecessary grief.

After hitting OK, rescan your hosts and you should finally get your Green Light!

Credits go to the knowledge base and to Kevin Space.