Updating Qlogic HBA's in ESXi 4.1

[prutter]

Hi All,

I have to upgrade to ESXi and need to know how to get my Qlogic HBA's updated with the latest firmware and driver.  I have a new server that i upgraded but it shows that it loads QLA4xxx during boot.  I'm guessing that's not right.  Anyhow just curious how it's done in ESXi or if i need to take it out and update with a windows box.  Any help is appreciated.  Thanks

[vmroyale]

Hello.

You can usually use a Linux LiveCD.  Check out "How to Install Vendor Updates on Server Hardware Running ESXi" for more information.

Good Luck!

[BenConrad]

This is going to be fun for you!

ESX (classic) allowed the installation of iscli which could do firmware, bios and firmware settings inside of the COS.  With ESXi you can't install the iscli program so you will need to download and use a Qlogic supplied ISO that will identify and update you qlogic cards (offline).

The tricky part in ESXi is figuring out how to apply firmware settings such as KeepAliveTO, AFW_Device_Timeouts and HBA_Reserved_TCP_Config.  At this time there is no way to set these parameters unless you move the Qlogic card to a Windows or Linux box (or boot the system with a live iso that has the qlogic drivers and utilities working properly) and then set the parameters.

We are slowly throwing away our Qlogic cards in favor of the 4.1 U1 s/w iSCSI initiator.  What we burn up in extra CPU cycles is worth the aggravation these Qlogic cards have caused us over the years.

Ben

[Troy_Clavell]

We have some Qlogic cards in our BL460's.  If you have HP Servers, the firmware CD will have the update.

[prutter]

Ufortunately i have 4 hosts that have all Qlogic.  I thought that would be teh better way to go instead of the sw initiator.  I think that would cause me too much overhead on the CPU. What does VMware support say about this config?  Anything special?  They are on the HCL.  Well i guess it's not the end of the world if i have to put them in a windows box to update.  Thanks for teh reply.

[prutter]

have 3 IBM 3650's and now one Dell R710.  We are chnaging since IBM hasn't served us too good.

[DSTAVERT]

Build a Windows Live CD. BartPE or http://sanbarrow.com/moa.htm

[Troy_Clavell]

the ESXi media will have the firmware for your Qlogic cards.  Is there a specific reason why need need to patch beyond that?

[prutter]

Not sure what version it it but what do you do when a new version comes out.  Right now one of my hosts is joined to the cluster and works but since it's new and not being utilized now i wanted to make sure it was up to date. Eventually it will need to be done.  Can't figure out why vmware made that process near impossible to perform.  I think that is another step back with the new version.

[BenConrad]

I don't think this applies to Qlogic iSCSI HBAs, just FC HBAs where there is a unified driver that contains both driver & firmware.

Ben

[BenConrad · Accepted solution]

According to Qlogic, the only way to get the firmware/bios updates is via:

http://kb.qlogic.com/KanisaPlatform/Publishing/476/1698_f.SAL_Public.html

This links you to their ISO qFLASHERCD.iso, not sure what version of firmware is available on that ISO.  We run 3.0.1.53.  You could also use the BarPe method that was previously mentioned.

And it's too bad that you can't set important firmware paramters inside ESXi with their driver.

Ben

[johndickjr]

We were having high latentcy (>300ms) issues with HP BL 260 blades with Qlogic iSCSI HBAs when my co-worker stumbled across the "iscli" package. He installed the RPM under ESX4 and made a change to "HBA_Reserved_TCP_Config" from 0xbc01314c to 0xbc01324c based on a Dell/Equalogic forum post (Sorry, Don't know the link) and the latentcy dropped down to below 5ms.

On our ESX5i servers we could not install the RPM as rpm doesn't exist .. all we needed to do was to copy the binary over to the ESX5i server from the ESX4 server, set permissions and we were ready to rock the change.

I had an SR open with Vmware and the best they could do was to move us to the software initiator.

Here are my keywords in hope that some obscure google search helps you find this solution!

qlogic iscsi hardware hba high latentcy disconnecting luns slow rescan iscli fixed hp bl260