And now for something completely different

You knew it was true. Tim Curry is the voice of God.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0166990/

Old Dell hardware fluke

raises it's ugly head. Updating the PERC controller on a 2850 makes
the local vmfs volume inaccessible, even on 3.5 u3. Luckily the
commands for the workaround from 3.0 are still valid. KB Article
1001577 : http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1001577

Now I thought I updated to the latest PERC firmware..back to the
software update repos...