We're having an issue with a couple of our hosts with fiber targets going missing after a reboot. If we wait for 24 hours or so, 2 or 3 of the targets will reappear. If we leave it for a day or so, then, then maybe 5 or 6 targets will reappear. A day or so later, all 11 missing targets will appear. Now, on one of the hosts, we have an additional HBA installed, and running in pass through mode to a Windows 2008R2 guest. The Windows guest can see all of the targets all of the time - even when the ESXi host that it is running on cannot.
We started off at the Cisco end, since we're fairly new to Cisco, and we had TACS remote in and look at our setup. They were happy that all the LUNs were being presented to the fiber switch that the host was connected to, and that there was full connectivity, and that we could ping them over the fabric.
Since the cards are QLogic, we installed the Qlogic snapin on the vCenter Server, along with the CIMs on the hosts. Once that was done, we could see each of the hosts being presented and visible to the QLogic card - even the ones that the ESXi host was currently unable to see. At this point we thought that it was either a driver issue, or an ESXi issue.
So, we opened a call with vmware about this. And here's the issue. The missing targets are fiber tape drives, and vmware doesnt support tape drives, so they weren't interested in helping. They did say that we should talk to the partner responsible for the drivers (QLogic - which we are), but they wouldn't be able to do anything. The fact that I was not looking for support on connecting up a drive, and that I just wanted to be able to see all the targets being presented to the host, fell on deaf ears.
So... Has anyone seen an issue like this, and/or have any ideas?
Graham