Has anyone out there converted from LSI to Paravirtual on a production machine? Did it go smoothly?
I have a Win2K8 R2 guest that lives on an ESX 5.0 host. The guest is serving up a large number of LUNs via RDM. Each of the LUNs is over 2TB in size. I have been running into a whole slew of storage related errors on the host. Most of them were related to pathing issues with the backend and I have worked with the storage vendor to resolve those.
The latest issues are now coming from LSI_SAS with the error, "Reset to device, \Device\RaidPort2, was issued."
From the research I have done, the Paravirtual SCSI driver is supposed to help alleviate the kind of performance issues that I am having. My question is how safe is it to convert the driver on a production machine?
My intention is to power the guest off, Change the SCSI controller device in the guest settings, and then power it back on.
My concern is that the OS is going to freak out and not be able to see any of the disks.
Another complication to the situation is that there have been a large number of ntfs.sys errors related to a couple of the LUNs. Those LUNs will need to be chkdsk'd on the next reboot. I'm 90% certain that the ntfs.sys errors were generated by high latency because of the pathing issues. Those issues have been resolved.
