Driver of RAID controller

[uvdevnull]

I have a functioning server running ESXi 7.0.3

I need to do some offline troubleshooting so I cloned the disk and installed it in another server with what I thought was the same controller since they are both MegaRAID. However, while they have a similar name, they are different. This product has been bought and sold numerous times with each new manufacturer changing it enough to require different drivers.

The server that will be used for troubleshooting has an older generation Broadcom/LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260 card in it using driver "rste" while the source server that was cloned has the newer generation Avago MegaRAID SAS 9361 using driver "lsi_mr3". They use different drivers and despite the hypervisor loading fine on the clone, the datastore is not visible. Do you think if I get the same Avago controller that uses the lsi_mr3 driver, the datastore will be accessible on the cloned server?

[markey165]

That would seem like a possible way forward.

However cloning an ESXi disk and installing it in a 2nd server, is probably a bad idea for all sorts of reasons. All of the configuration files, log files, host UUID, even certificates will all be identically cloned.

Performing a clean install of ESXi is easy enough to do, and is almost certainly best practise (as well as good practise).