Duplicate SCSI IDs causing SATA drives in drive bay #1 to go missing from ESXi when running the nhpsa driver on Gen 9 HPE Synergy compute modules, HPE DL380 and other HPE products that include a SAS expander

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article highlights an issue observed when using Gen 9 HPE Synergy compute modules or HPE DL380s with ESXi 6.5 or later and the native nhpsa driver and SATA drives.

A problem has been identified whereby a SATA drive installed in drive bay #1 (top left) of a HPE D3940 40-bay Storage Module within a HPE Synergy frame, or with a DL380, will not be seen by ESXi, but all other SATA drives in all other drive bays in the Storage Module are discovered correctly.

When using multiple D3940s in one Synergy frame then each D3940 in the frame can be vulnerable to this issue. It is expected that any HPE product that includes a SAS expander could be vulnerable to this problem.

This problem is not always seen, but occurs when the SCSI ID assigned to the SATA device in drive bay #1 is seen as duplicating a SCSI ID already used by an expander device. In some cases, ESXi discovers the enclosure/expander first, causing the drive to be rejected as a duplicate ID. In other cases, ESXi discovers the drive first causing the duplicate enclosure/expander to be rejected instead.

Commands such as esxcfg-scsidevs –c will show all drives and enclosures/expanders that ESXi has discovered but with a device missing.

The problem is caused by ESXi 6.5 reading the wrong field in Inquiry VPD page 83h data for enclosure/expander devices.
 
The issue has only been observed with the nhpsa drivers and SATA devices however, it may occur on other storage enclosures, drivers and generations.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.0
VMware vSphere ESXi 6.5
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Installable
VMware ESXi 3.5.x Installable
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Embedded
VMware ESXi 3.5.x Embedded
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.5
VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1
VMware ESXi 4.0.x Installable
VMware ESXi 4.1.x Embedded

Resolution

This issue is resolved in nhpsa driver rev 2.0.18-1 (or later).

The full driver file names are:

nhpsa-2.0.18-1OEM.650.0.0.4598673.x86_64.vib

or

nhpsa-2.0.24-1OEM.650.0.0.4598673.x86_64.vib