ESXi Loss of QLogic HBA under Storage Adaptors

Nikumba

Nikumba

Nikumba

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We have ESXi 4.0U2 environment over two HP BL460C blades (BL01, BL03) and a 3rd (BL09) on 4.1U1 all blades have QLogic QLE406Xc iSCSI HBA plugged into a mezzanine slot on the blade.

We had a problem with BL03 so we put it into maintenance mode, rebooted it and it came back with an error when booting of the SD card, we have had this error before basically means the SD card is corrupted.

So we power off the blade, swap out the SD cards, installed 4.1U1 via iLO as we want to be at this level, the install proceded fine, the blade rebooted, and we configured it as per our environment.

We then readded BL03 to our environment, the add went fine, however when we went to configure the storage, it was only listing the internal P410i and the iSCSI Software adapator not the QLogic cards.

To date we have tried:

Installing 4.0U2 on the SD card
Installing 4.0U2 to a SAS disk we isntalled in the blade
Installing 4.1U1 to a SAS disk we isntalled in the blade
Have flashed the BIOS and the firmware of the card, via the instructions from HP and QLogic
Currently we are using the Update Manager to patch up our 4.1 install

We are not able to power off another blade and swap the HBA cards around as we can survive on two blades just not one blade.

We can not work out where the fault lies, the hard ware has not changed, the software has not changed, used the same install media as we have alread done.

We have the blades under maintenance so we are toying with the idea of getting the blade hardware replaced but we can see the card on boot so not sure that would resolve the issue.

Can anyone suggest anything at all we could try?

Thanks

Kimbie
 
Only thing I can suggest is get the drivers from the VMWare website.

I had a similar issue installing 2 new hosts that wouldn't recognise one of their NICs, after installing the drivers and rebooting everything appeared as it should.
 
Hey ! :)

Sounds like an awesome problem you have there!

1st off! are you sure you did not just use the software iSCSI adaptor to configure the SAN?

2nd Are you sure you did not install additional drivers for the Qlogic Cards on previous installs. (USING SSH)

:)
 
Yeah its a very un-awesome problem as we have one of our blades down.

@Little_Crow - We thought about that, but the HP build of ESXi comes with all the drivers, and it is the same ISO file we have used every single time we have had to do the rebuild.

@markadams15 - Yes I am very sure we do not use the software iSCSI, we didn't spend ~£600 on the iSCSI HBA cards from QLogic for the fun of it :)

No additional drivers have ever been installed.

Though I have convienced HP to send me out a new blade mobo and iSCSI card under out service contract in case it is something strange there.

Kimbie
 
Looking at the 'Drivers and Tools' tab for ESXi 4.1, it appears that the drivers being released for 5.1 still apply to previous versions - which are a lot newer than the HP ESXi 4.1 build.

Might be worth a shot while you're waiting for the delivery from HP.
 
@markadams15 - We use dvSwitches and the iSCSI HBA card is not a network card as such.
@groen - Not an option as we have two other blades running through the SAN switches.

But the problem has been fixed, HP brought out a new iSCSI HBA card and blade mainboard and swapped them both other and now working, thank god for service contracts :)
 
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