obtain HBA firmware

allencrawford · ‎02-10-2010

I've been digging around trying to find if there's a way to grab the HBA (fiber-channel) firmware with PowerCLI. I haven't had any luck yet (also have been digging through the "VMware vSphere API Reference Documentation" and not having any luck there either. I see my NIC firmware and HP-specific firmware versions (SCSI controller, BIOS, etc.) from the HP CIM providers, but can't find my HBA's firmware (HP-branded Emulex LPe12000). Am I out of luck or just missing something? I'm guessing I can get it from the unsupported console (haven't tried, but am used to getting it from the /proc filesystem on ESX classic) but that's no fun as we don't enable (nor plan to) SSH on our ESXi 4 hosts.

lamw · ‎02-10-2010

FC HBA firmware is not available via the vSphere APIs, there are some basic information such as the model, PCI bus the driver that's being used/etc. but that's about it.

http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vc-sdk/visdk400pubs/ReferenceGuide/vim.host.HostBusAdapter.h...

If you want to see what that info looks like, take a look at this report and just search for "HBA": http://engineering.ucsb.edu/~duonglt/vmware/sample_vmware_health_report_standard.html

If CIM can see the right version/etc. You may want to look at querying from the CIM APIs to extract this information

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allencrawford · ‎02-14-2010

Yeah, that's the same HBA info I found when digging around. I checked some of the CIM stuff too and haven't seen it there. I'm kind of assuming that if it doesn't show up in the "Hardware Status" tab that it won't be in the CIM API either. Oh well, maybe HP will get around to adding it with version 1.3.

lamw · ‎02-15-2010

Yep, that's correct. If I don't see the information populated in the vSphere Client, then it's probably not available from CIM and the APIs