bcm5709 not present as storage controller

[pbrunnen]

Hello all,

I have been googling around at this and trying different things over the past two days without much luck...

I have one esxi 5.0 host with a dual-port Broadcom BCM5709C NIC card added in (listed by dell as Dell Part# F169G).  The card not only appers as a NIC but also as a storage controller (hba).

This worked great, so I picked up two more on ebay (bcm95709A0907G).  But for these cards, they never appear under the storage controller config.  I see them as NICs and the vmkernel logs show that iscsi_not_supported for them.

Why does this work with one card, but not the other?

There is no config utility presented on system bootup to configure the NICs...

I can't seem to find any firmware files for this card online...

I can't find a way to activate the iSCSI offload...

Anyone have any thoughts where I can look next?   Is it possible some of these cards are not licensed for iscsi offload?

Thanks!

Sincerely, confused.

  -Peter.

[vlho · Accepted solution]

Hi Peter,

two models of BCM95709A0907G exist as you can see here: http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/power/ps2q10-20100411-broadcom.pdf (Figure 1).

The firts supports iSCSI boot only, the second supports iSCSI and HBA too.
It seems that you have the first model.

[pbrunnen]

Hi vlho,

I looked all over the place and couldn't find a document that defined that.  Looks like you have the magic touch. 

It bothers me that they have two models with the same broadcom "BCM95709A0907G" part number...

Thanks for the help! 

- Cheers, Peter.