Emulex LP101 Support in ESX 3.x

[Brian_Chang]

Hope someone can answer this for me. The Emulex LP101 is not on the compatibility list for ESX 3.x but is listed as a supported HBA for ESX 2.5. A test install of ESX 3.0.1 on a host with a LP101 shows the HBA in the settings as if it was a working HBA. At the time, this was not connected to the actual SAN. Does this mean that ESX 3.x supports the LP101 even though it's not on the compatibility list? Would hate to have to drop a few grand on new HBAs for an upgrade to ESX 3.x.

[cheeko]

Obviously VMware included a driver for the Emulex LP101 (or a HBA with the same chipset) in VI3. While this might run perfectly well, you maybe could run into (political) troubles if you have a storage related problem one day and need VMware support.

[Brian_Chang]

What's interesting is that there are no HBAs with the same chipset. Either they based the host OS build off of ones used for 2.x or they added the driver in. In both cases I'm wondering why they didn't add this card to the compatibility list especially since it's a relatively inexpensive HBA.

Perhaps a representative from VMware can chime in on this discrepency? I'm not to worried about support, between the KBs and the forums, a vast majorities of issues I've encountered have been dealt with.

[wobbly1]

essentially all the emulex cards use the same driver and for rhel3 u6 the lp101 uses the native 7.3.2 driver used in esx 3.0.1

Message was edited by:

wobbly1

[Brian_Chang]

Still the question is why is this card not on the compatibility list? At the very least, if what you say is true, then these cards should be supported for awhile. And you can't really beat the price of these things.