The storage all paths down (APD) handling on your ESXi host is activated by default. When this functionality is activated and a storage device enters the APD state, the host continues to retry nonvirtual machine I/O commands only for a limited time period. After the time period expires, the host stops its retry attempts and terminates any nonvirtual machine I/O. You can deactivate the APD handling feature on your host.

If you deactivate the APD handling, the host will indefinitely continue to retry issued commands in an attempt to reconnect to the APD device. This behavior might cause virtual machines on the host to exceed their internal I/O timeout and become unresponsive or fail. The host might become disconnected from vCenter Server.

Procedure

  1. In the vSphere Client, navigate to the ESXi host.
  2. Click the Configure tab.
  3. Under System, click Advanced System Settings.
  4. In the Advanced System Settings table, select the Misc.APDHandlingEnable parameter and click the Edit icon.
  5. Change the value to 0.

Results

If you deactivate the APD handling, you can reactivate it and set its value to 1 when a device enters the APD state. The internal APD handling feature turns on immediately and the timer starts with the current timeout value for each device in APD.