SCSI Tape Drive on ESX 4.1

[edvhofer]

Hello!

I recently had to re-install our ESX 4.1 host and now i have the following problem:

There was a SCSI tape drive connected to the host and everything went fine. But after the re-install of the host there is no SCSI tape drive recognized.

On a SLES system everything is mounted automatically.

The host is a HP ProLiant DL380 G5 and the HP Ultrium LTO4 1760 SCSI external tape drive is connected to the host via a HP SC11Xe SCSI PCI card.

There are no special drivers of the pci card for esx systems and the red hat drivers don't work.

The BIOS recognizes the PCI card and the vCenter server does that too... but f.e. in /proc/scsi/scsi is no entry.

Does anyone of you already had this issue or have a hint for me?

Greetings from Austria

Daniel

[MauroBonder]

Hello and Welcome!

Take look this kb http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=101640...

[edvhofer]

Thank you for the fast reply.

The tape drive is not recognized by ESX. I see the SCSI PCI card, but i can't work with it. When i go to: vCenter Server -> Konfiguration -> Storage -> "SCSI card" -> Paths .. i see the status failed.

I think this is all a driver problem, but I don't know how to fix it.

[MauroBonder]

You´re welcome. Do you already check if this hardware have compatibility with this version of VMware ? You can check it here - www.vmware.com/go/hcl

[edvhofer]

It is on the compatibility list.

[MauroBonder]

can you post a screen shot ?

[edvhofer]

There is the screenshot 😃

[MauroBonder]

please read this thread http://communities.vmware.com/message/1847202

[edvhofer]

That doesn't help me.

The tape drive isn't recognized by the ESX host. I have no device file in /dev and there is no entry in vCenter Server.

There is also no driver loaded in lsmod.

As you can see in the screenshot, the card is recognized, but there is no tape drive.

The KB-articles don't have problems with "not-recognized" tape drives... they all have problems with the guests having access to the tape drive.

[ranjitcool]

You know what I think, you may have to do a pass through to the vm to acces the tape drive.

RJ

[edvhofer]

Hello again!

After a long and intense research i found the solution:

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esxcli nmp satp addrule --satp VMW_SATP_LOCAL --driver"mptspi" --description="Specific rule for LSI Logic Card HP SC11Xe"

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I typed this command right into the console and, Voila! Everything works fine after a reboot.

Greetings!

Daniel