Are you a EMC ControlCenter and VMware customer? Good hotfix to know about..

Virtual Geek has a write up on EMC ControlCenter and Vmware, and a hotfix. I wanted to post this as it is one of those things that is good to know.

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Was working a customer case where they were having issues with VMotion and Control Center. Control Center is one of the only Storage Resource Management tools with tons of VMware integration – and has had it for more than a year.

Ok, Control Center has active discovery (i.e. agent) and passive discovery mechanisms (i.e. leverage an API). Most VMware-integrated features use the passive mechanism – basically ControlCenter has a VM-proxy (i.e. a host which can be a VM that has software that queries the ESX CIM API and the VC APIs). Some customers want more. For example, they want file-level reporting for chargeback and analysis WITHIN the VM. Or, they want drill-downs into databases in VMs. These require agents to run inside the VM if you want that (again, ESX-layer chargeback, utilization reports, thin provisioning use, performance and VMDK->Datastore->LUN/filesystem->backend details – those have no agent requirement).

So, the problem only arises when ControlCenter components running on a guest systems (ergo agents to provide file-level reporting or application integration) are Vmotioned and ControlCenter has discovered the ESX server hosting the VMs that those ControlCenter components are running on.

The root cause is that the ControlCenter store component incorrectly interprets a Vmotion activity as a deletion of a VM (i.e. at the ESX CIM level, the VM just disappeared, and requires correlation at the VC layer). That deletion is not allowed by other rules within the ControlCenter repository and the discovery of the ESX server fails resulting in stale data in ControlCenter and sometimes corruption to ControlCenter component configuration data.

We just released a hotfix for this problem for EMC Control Center 6.1 (HF4486) and will be releasing one for 6.0 shortly (HF4485).

This primus case contains more information regarding the problem. emc203588

http://knowledgebase.emc.com/emcice/documentDisplay.do;jsessionid=0735EE24ACC9E5D50A82A6A5D8CF9820?docType=1006&clusterName=DefaultCluster&resultType=5002&groupId=1&page=&docProp=$solution_id&docPropValue=emc203588&passedTitle=null

Based on our testing, once the correct hotfix is applied, Vmotion of VMs with ControlCenter components installed will work fine and there will be no support limitations.

Thanks ControlCenter team!!

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Thanks for the write up, gives people a chance to know about it.

Full Source Post

http://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2009/01/are-you-a-emc-controlcenter-and-vmware-customer-good-hotfix-to-know-about.html