Dell PERC H700 controllers - safe to upgrade to vSAN 6.0?

[beeguar]

The R610 servers are on the HCL, but the cards are not listed as supported with vSAN 6.0.

The H700 is a rebranded LSI 9260.

The 9260 is supported for vSAN on ESXi 5.5u1/u2, but it is not listed for vSAN6.0.

Is there any new feature of vSAN 6.0 which would prevent this card from functioning for vSAN 6?

[zdickinson]

Depends on the use.  Production, I wouldn't upgrade until everything is on the list.  I assumed that if it was on the 5.5 HCL, it would be on the 6 HCL.  Not the case, we have a Micron PCIe SSD, and thus far it is not on the HCL.  In fact, no PCIe cards are.  We're having some issues.  Is it the unsupported SSD?  Who knows.  Fortunatly it's our DR facility so we have some time to figure it out.

This is my fault I didn't check the HCL, but if I knew something was not on the HCL...  I would not do the upgrade.  Thank you, Zach.

[beeguar]

Agreed, but it's just a rocky slope because it's done by vendor discretion and it costs the vendors to certify a component. If they no longer sell the component, they have little reason to shoulder the cost of certification of it.

I might keep things backed up frequently to the SAN and do the upgrade anyway and monitor it for awhile.

[ChrisKuhns]

I don't know there is anything that would prevent it from functioning, but I have had issues where support wasn't provided because the components weren't on the HCL. Mind you, this was three years ago and a different product. 

I have found the VSAN to be a very particular beast. Be weary of going outside the lines on it. That's been my experience.

[beeguar]

Did it successfully tonight. Took 2 hours per host in the cluster but wasn't too bad.

I used Rawlinson's guide here to get it done: Upgrading to VMware Virtual SAN 6.0 | Virtual Blocks - VMware Blogs

So yeah, it works. Supported? Probably not.