Emulex SN30L22004 mezz HBAs gone from the storage adapter list after moving a host to ESXi 8.0 U3
One host in a blade chassis went to ESXi 8.0 U3 and came back with no Fibre Channel at all. The datastores are gone, the adapters are not in the storage adapter list, and nothing logs in on the fabric side for those ports. The rest of the cluster is untouched and still sees the same LUNs.
- blade host with two Emulex SN30L22004 Mezz 16Gb 2-port Fibre Channel adapters
- upgraded from ESXi 7.0 U3 to 8.0 U3, no hardware changes
- 16G SFP+ optics and patch cords unchanged, both ports affected
[root@host:~] esxcli storage core adapter list
-> no vmhba entries for the FC ports, only the onboard storage controller
[root@host:~] lspci -v | grep -i emulex
-> both mezzanine ports are listed on the PCI busWhat I tried:
- reseatde the mezzanine card and swapped the optics on one port
- rescanned the storage adapters and rebooted twice
- checked the fabric switch, the ports simply never come up
The card is clearly still on the PCI bus, so is this an optics or card failure that happened to coincide with the upgrade, or something on the ESXi side? Before I open a ticket I would rather know which of the two I am chasing.
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Comments 3
Neither. The device showing up in
lspciwhile nothing appears inesxcli storage core adapter listis the signature of a device that no driver has claimed. The optics are irrelevant to that symptom - an unclaimed adapter never drives its transceivers in the first place, so the fabric silence is a consequence, not the cause.The reason is the driver, not your card: there is no certified driver for this adapter in ESXi 8.0. It was supported up to 7.0 U3 and that is where support stops. Nothing you install on the host will bring it back on 8.0.
Two steps, short and long term:
And make this the standing pre-flight for any ESXi major upgrade: run every storage adapter past the compatibility guide before you book the window. When a card quietly falls off that list, the host behaves the way it would with a snapped fibre - no adapter, no datastores, no fabric login - and people burn days on optics and cables before they think of it.
That matches what I have.
lspci -v | grep -i emulexlists both ports, the storage adapter list has nothing, so I stopped touching optics.Rolled that host back to 7.0 U3 and the two SN30L22004 came back as storage adapters, datastores mounted on the first rescan, nothing changed on the fabric side. Replacement adapters that are listed for 8.0 are being quoted now, and the rest of the cluster stays on 7.0 U3 until they land. Expensive lesson for something a five-minute HCL check would have caught.
Same trap one layer down, on the optics. Emulex mezz cards in Cisco UCS C-series check the module at power-on and put
Unsupported Optic Installedon the BIOS screen when they dislike it. Cisco spells out what they take: LPe31002-M6 (UCSC-PCIE-BD16GF) - 16G AFBR-57F5MZ-ELX or FTLF8529P3BCV-EM; LPe32002-M2 (UCSC-PCIE-BD32GF) - 32G AFBR-57G5MZ-ELX or FTLF8532P4BCV-EM. The trailing letters are not decoration - they say the EEPROM was written the way Emulex wants it, and the same glass from Finisar or Avago in a plain-coded version gets refused. F2 at boot, Advanced tab, adapter, Scan for Fibre Devices - that shows what the card itself sees.Brocade keeps a comparable list on the switch side, per platform and per part number, with minimum FOS attached: secure optics on the SX6 and 7810 want FOS 8.2.1e or 8.2.2c or higher.