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vVols and VMs became inaccessible during network switch maintenance

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Applies to

  • NetApp ONTAP v9.16.1P3
  • NetApp AFF-C250
  • NetApp ONTAP tools for VMware vSphere v9.13P2
  • iSCSI multipath configurations
  • Environments with dual-switch SAN topologies

Issue

  • During a scheduled network switch maintenance, multiple Virtual Volumes (vVols) and Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) datastores became inaccessible, resulting in multiple Virtual Machines (VMs) being down.
  • Relevant log output:

From ONTAP logs, when Switch A rebooted:

Sat Sep 13 22:33:11-0400 [<---->:kernel:netif.linkDown:info]: Ethernet e2a: Link down, check cable.
Sat Sep 13 22:33:11-0400 [<---->:vifmgr:vifmgr.lifdown.noports:alert]: LIF iSCSI_1 (on virtual server 8), IP address
<---->, currently cannot be hosted on node <---->, port e2a, or any of its failover targets, and is being marked as down.

Similar events for e2a and e2b ports on both nodes, corresponding to switch reboots.

From ESXi logs:

2025-09-14T02:33:14.890Z vobd[2097666]: [vob.net.vmnic.linkstate.down] vmnic vmnic2 link state down
2025-09-14T02:33:26.032Z vobd[2097666]: [esx.problem.vmfs.heartbeat.timedout] <VMFS_DATASTORE_NAME>
2025-09-14T02:33:39.941Z vobd[2097666]: [vob.iscsi.connection.stopped] iScsi connection 0 stopped for vmhba64:C3:T1

All non-local datastores went down at the time of the outage.

 

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