vSAN Health Check: False warning about incompatible driver for only one host

[peetz]

Greetings,

we have added two new machines (HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen10) to an existing vSAN cluster (vSphere 6.5 U3). All machines have

• exactly the same hardware configuration
• exactly the same ESXi patch level, firmware and driver versions

However, for only one of the newly added hosts the vSAN Health Check shows a warning about an incompatible driver for the SmartArray controller. See this picture:

All hosts have the smartpqi driver version 1.0.4.3008 installed which is also on the list of recommended drivers, except for one host?!. How can it happen that the list of recommended drivers differs for only one host??? Must be a bug somewhere ...

I already rebooted the host that shows the warning, I disconnected and re-connected the host from vCenter, and I restarted the vsan-health service on the vCenter server, all to no avail.

Has anyone seen this before? Does anyone have a clue how to fix this?

Thanks

Andreas

[TheBobkin · Accepted solution]

Hello Andreas,

Please if you can double-check via iLO that they do indeed have the same Firmware version installed - I say this as it is recommending a lower driver version which is likely one that is on the vSAN HCL matching the firmware in use.

Also if you could confirm that the controller utility is installed as without this it may not be able to check the firmware version installed correctly.

Bob

[peetz]

You're the man, Paul ...

I was absolutely sure that all hosts have the same firmware, because they were all updated with the same HPE SPP media.

However, it turned out that on this server the SmartArray controller had accidentally been disabled in BIOS before the SPP was applied, so its firmware was *not* updated like on all other hosts...

Doing that now, and I'm pretty sure that it will fix the issue.

Thanks

Andreas

[TheBobkin]

Andreas, if I took at face-value every time someone (not just customers but sometimes colleagues too) told me X and Y things were 'identical' or 'the same' etc. I would likely be a few hundred hours of life shorter as often this is not the case. And to go even further, who is to say that you can't have 2 *identical* servers except someone haphazardly spilled milk all over just one of them :smileygrin: - I know that is an extreme example but I have seen all sorts of things different where at first they seem 'the same'. A good way of looking at it is they are certainly not the same as one has issues! Anyway, glad my gut appears to have been correct here.

Bob (AKA Paul)