non-volatile memory controller of nvme drops of off HCL

[sucram65]

the non-volatile memory controller of the Micron 9700 Pro flash drives in everyone of my 10 all-flash nodes has dropped off the HCL list. All the other health checks on the drives pass. What to do? I can't replace 100 drives, and we need to upgrade to VCF 4.3.1 to close the vCenter vulnerabilities. WTF!

[depping]

Contact Micron or the vendor you bought these devices from, VMware doesn't certify these devices, the vendors do. Sometimes they "end-of-life" a device for various reasons, or they forget to submit the needed paperwork.

[sucram65]

Aaah, I wondered who was responsible for the certification. I'll start with our server vendor since they'll have the weight. These 9700 Pro drives are only 1 or 2 years out of the gate and are definitely not EOL.

[depping]

I just received the current certification pipeline, but don't see that model. Don't see the model in our HCL even. Did you mean 9300 by any chance?

Anyway, the OEM should get these listed indeed for 7.x ASAP.

[sucram65]

Hi, yes. I misspoke. I did mean the 9300 (Micron_9300_MTFDHAL3T8TDP). Thank you for taking an interest in this. I did contact our Server vendor on Friday, who in turn contacted Micron. I have been told that their Manager Of Technical Solutions Architecture in now working on this.

[sucram65]

I just got off of a conference call with our server vendor and Micron. Micron claims that they never certified the 9300 Pro for vSAN. Yet, these devices are clearly depicted on the vSAN HCL. They also appear in Skyline Health. Essentially they are saying that they are not going to certify the drives for 7.x. They did not offer any technical rationale for why the drives could not be certified. They want to sell a new product, the 7300, which is not as performant. How many customers are they marooning in this situation? This is unacceptable.

VMware Compatibility Guide - vsan

VMware Compatibility Guide - ssd

[sucram65]

They're still trying to sell these drives and saying to contact sales! They appear to be just two years into the product life.

MTFDHAL3T8TDP-1AT1ZAB | Micron Technologies, Inc | Micron Technologies, Inc

[depping]

I assume the server vendor sold you these drives. It could be that the server vendor certified them.

[sucram65]

I provided the Micron team with screenshots from the HCL and they now admit to having done the certification. Our server vendor was just a surprised as we were. There is supposed to be another meeting today, I believe, where Micron will propose a solution. For more $$$$, undoubtedly.

[sucram65]

What I find so stunning, dumbfounding, and disheartening is that the Micron would engage in the reputational risk of such a seemingly arbitrary decision. There is no good reason for it other than someone made a business decision that intentionally harms their customers. Not only us as end-users, but the companies like our server vendor to whom they supply their storage devices.

[sucram65]

I had a meeting yesterday between my server vendor and the Micron team responsible for 9300 specifically and current and upcoming products. Prior to that meeting they sent this reply to my server vendor.

“Micron has previously certified the 9300 3.8TB and 3.2TB densities for vSAN 6.7 and earlier releases.  Micron is not planning to certify the 9300 for vSAN 7.x – the decision was made due to engineering resource priorities.  Our engineering team for vSAN is focused on the 7400 (newly released product which can replace the 9300) as well as other upcoming products which have not yet been released.  Micron also offers other SSD products which are either already vSAN certified or are in process.  We always recommend consulting the VMware Compatibility Guide.”

We consulted with our pre-sales engineering team from VMware at every step in our process because we were building our own vSAN nodes rather buying Ready Nodes. Everything looked good to them. We believed we were in compliance with the compatibility guide at every turn. Then we arrive here. They say this decision was made nine months ago. We started about 12 months ago. Their decision by their admission in the meeting was perhaps not clearly communicated to the vSAN team at VMware. They also said that they had decided to EOL the drives at the time. Another decision that was not clearly communicated. They went on to note that they will make the formal announcement of the EOL status of the drives in Q1 next year.

Heels are dug in and it appears that there will be no movement on Micron's part. They want us to buy new drives. I don't know if any typical organization is going to turn around today and just buy new drives. There's the down time and then the expense, particularly when you're staring down 100 replacements.

Our VCF deployment works. vSAN is stable and i have every reason to believe that it will continue to function well. I'm going to do a test deployment of VCF 4.3.1 to check because that's where we need to be to close the vCenter vulnerabilty. But the only way forward in an upgrade is to disable the health checks for vSAN so that everything passes. I don't want to do that but it looks like that is what we're going to be forced to do.