NetApp and VMware Guest Timeout

During a recent customer VMware healthcheck, we noted a customer did perform the VMware NFS timeout tunings as recommended by NetApp TR-3749. However none of the guests had the correct guest level timeout tuning.

TR-3749 doesn’t explicitely spell out that you should make sure and update your guest level disk timeouts to match the NFS timeout tunings.

Also note that these disk timeout settings if done once in the guest, may be reset through a VMware Tools upgrade. (See http://communities.vmware.com/thread/212235) so watch out.

See NetApp article kb41511 “VMware ESX Guest OS I/O Timeout Settings for NetApp Storage Systems”  for more details.