At PEI, we work with all sorts of technologies, from IP phones to virtualized infrastructures. Sometimes, during an onsite visit, clients ask us if we can help out on something completely different. Of course we can!
The other day another Engineer sent me an IM about a problem a customer experienced after their VMware upgrade from 4.0 to 5.1. The customer uses Host Profiles to standardize all the hosts across the infrastructure and to check for any changes in the environment. They build a profile from an existing host, and then use that profile to check the other hosts. Pretty straight forward stuff. Unfortunately, they received errors. The errors:
Specification state absent from host: device naa.6000eb359ca4bbc2000000000000003f Path Selection Policy needs to be set to VMW_PSP_FIXED
Host state doesn’t match specification: device naa.6000eb359ca4bbc2000000000000003d Path Selection Policy needs to be set to default for claiming SATP
First, I verified they had the correct SATP settings for their SAN and those settings matched the profile. The settings checked out OK. That pointed us to a take a look at the profile itself. After plenty of searching around, we found a discussion that eventually referenced a VMware KB article, KB 2002488. This KB discusses this specific error, but for some reason didn’t show up in an internet search.
As it turns out, this is a known issue with ESXi 5.x Host Profiles. VMware provides a simple solution, though it doesn’t directly address the problem. Basically, VMware advises removing those parameters from the Host Profile. That solution clears the issue, and hopefully VMware provides a patch to correct the issue.
Tom Mehling, PEI
