I was recently asked to assist with an in place upgrade of our ESXi5.5u2 hosts 6u3. The hosts are Dell r720s. The ISO was VMware-VMvisor-Installer-6.0.0.update03-5050593.x86_64-Dell_Customized-A00. The upgrade appeared to run smoothly, host came up, registered in vCenter, and was manageable on the network. However, I soon realized that there was no storage available, and no connection to the SAN. We link to the SAN using an FCoE connection from a QLogic 8262 installed on the host. The FCoE ports appear to be enabled at the BIOS, and I can scan the ports over FCoE at the BIOS with the SAN coming back OK. At the moment I am working from the assumption that the physical card and connections are OK to the SAN because of this (possibly a bad assumption). Also, when managing the host from vSphere, the card is available as a NIC adapter and returns the correct model name for the adapter. However, the card will not present to the host as a storage adapter.
My immediate assumption is that there is a missing, corrupt, or incorrect ESXi driver for the FCoE functionality of the CNA, but this gets a bit outside of my scope to troubleshoot as I'm relatively new to working with ESXi and these hosts. Documentation suggested that the upgrade process retained existing drivers, which it looks like it did. It also appeared to upgrade drivers as the vibs were current for the card and time-stamped from the time of the upgrade.
So, my issue is that I cannot get a QLogic QLE8262 to present to a 6u3 host as a storage adapter after upgrade. My gut still tells me this is a driver issue, but there are multiple vibs installed for this hardware and I do not know which may be missing for this functionality.
Vib list:
Ports seen as NIC adapter:
Not present as Storage adapter:
Compatibility and referenced driver repository for card from here:
VMware Compatibility Guide - I/O Device Search
Apologies in advance for missing or poorly communicated information! And thanks in advance for any assist on this from more experienced admins!
EDIT:
So after digging around a bit more, it looks like the host was using a VMware driver for FC, not a QLogic driver? The installed qlnativefc driver on the host is 2.1.50.0-1vmw.600.3.57.5050593 from the Dell cusom upgrade ISO. The Dell Compatibility Guide only lists up to qlnativefc version 2.1.43.0-1 for fw version 4.18.xx (Of course, the QLogic site doesn't list ESXi 6.0 at all for compatibility. Dude! Dell, VMware, and QLogic needs to chat!) I could try rolling back to 2.1.43 and see what happens I guess? Still not sure if there might be other drivers for FCoE though. A driver lpfc looks related as well...
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