HPE 3PAR OS updates that fix VMware VAAI ATS Heartbeat issue

Customers that use HPE 3PAR StoreServs with 3PAR OS 3.2.1 or 3.2.2 and VMware ESXi 5.5 U2 or later, might notice one or more of the following symptoms:

hosts lose connectivity to a VMFS5 datastore
hosts disconnect from the vCenter
VMs hang during I/O operations
you see the messages like these in the vobd.log or vCenter Events tab

Lost access to volume due to connectivity issues. Recovery attempt is in progress and the outcome will be reported shortly

you see the following messages in the vmkernel.log

ATS Miscompare detected beween test and set HB images at offset XXX on vol YYY

2015-11-20T22:12:47.194Z cpu13:33467)ScsiDeviceIO: 2645: Cmd(0x439dd0d7c400) 0x89, CmdSN 0x2f3dd6 from world 3937473 to dev &#34;naa.50002ac0049412fa&#34; failed H:0x0 D:0x2 P:0x0 Valid sense data: 0xe 0x1d 0x0.

Interestingly, not only HPE is affected by this. Multiple vendors have the same issue. VMware described this issue in KB2113956. HPE has published a customer advisory about this.

Workaround

If you have trouble and you can update, you can use this workaround. Disable ATS heartbeat for VMFS5 datastores. VMFS3 datastores are not affected by this issue. To disable ATS heartbeat, you can use this PowerCLI one-liner:

Get-AdvancedSetting -Entity hostname -Name VMFS3.UseATSForHBOnVMFS5 | Set-AdvancedSetting -Value 0 -Confirm:$false

Solution

But there is also a solution. Most vendors have published firwmare updates for their products. HPE has released

3PAR OS 3.2.2 MU3
3PAR OS 3.2.2 EMU2 P33, and
3PAR OS 3.2.1 EMU3 P45

All three releases of 3PAR OS include enhancements to improve ATS heartbeat. Because 3PAR OS 3.2.2 has also some nice enhancements for Adaptive Optimization, I recommend to update to 3PAR OS 3.2.2.