QLOGIC or EMULEX HBA for ESXi 6.5

[Kraljo]

Hi all,

We are planning a new hardware purchase to replace our current ESXi hosts running on HP DL380 G9 servers. So far we have had some issues with the HBA PCIe 8Gb (QLOGIC and some EMULEX ) cards like servers rebooting suddenly due to  PCIe NME errors, out of MSI-X vectors, difficulty finding appropriate firmware and upgrade procedure to upgrade HBA bios etc...

If you could share your experience  with new HBA 16gb models from QLOGIC or EMULEX an how they work with ESXi 5.5 and 6.5 it would be much appreciated

So, The question is Qlogoc or EMULEX ?

[Nick_Andreev]

Over the years I've been working with dozens of different NICs and HBAs and rarely had any issues. What were the issues you experienced?

I would not be worried about specific NIC/HBA models and maybe rather looked at some best practices related to updates/upgrades using VUM and custom vendor ESXI images, that have the latest vendor-specific drivers and provide the best performance and stability.

[Finikiez]

I prefer Qlogic HBAs.

There are two reasons:

1. For most cards FW for card is included in driver package. So it's a single step to upgrade driver and FW for a card.

2. As for me, emulex is more buggy and they do several driver\versions per month. So you can update them very often.

[Kraljo]

Hi,

Specific issues:

Maybe this is HW vendor specific issue, but for HP G8 DL 380 servers it was quite the laborious process to upgrade HBA fw, bios since it was not updating via the standard HPE SPP for proliant.

I had to install special plugin for Windows VCenter and CIM modules from Qlogic, witch were also missing from the HP customised ESXi image in order to discover the HBA, and then find the .bin FW file for the upgrade, by unpacking a windows .exe flasjhing file in order to upgrade

For HP G9 you can find firmware flashing software for esxi so that is an improvement

Emulex was a different story as well. Special server to install emulex oneconnect and i took a while to just discover the procedure and find installation files. And all this effort for a firmware upgrade!!!

Since we are moving away from the windows based vcenter and using the 6.5 appliance, i do not rely like a solution to deploy Windows VMs just so i can update HBA firmware.

[Kraljo]

Hi,

I am kind a leaning towards Qlogic as well

Tnx,