Certain HPE NVMe Drives may register as a different device on ESXi 6.7/7.x hosts

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

Educate awareness of incorrect PCI IDs based on FW updates.

Symptoms:

The example below showcases a P4800X NVME PCI device being registered on an ESXi host as a Intel Corporation 900P.

You have recently upgraded or installed specific FW on your NVME device and see it as another drive after ESXi boots up.

From the boot log, you will see the device probed:

0:00:00:11.136 cpu0:2097152)PCI: 1097: 0000:af:00.0: probing 8086:2700 8086:3900

Which will list on the host as a...

Intel Corporation 900P Series [Add-in Card](8086:2700 8086:3900)

Environment

VMware ESXi 6.7.x
VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.x

Cause

This is a known issue caused by Firmware. For reference, the device identification is probed directly from the firmware and thus the hardware is responsible for this information. ESXi cannot change this information.

Resolution

The device/PCI device identification is owned by the firmware/hardware of the device itself. ESXi cannot manipulate this or formulate this information on its own. This information is gathered on device discovery, more often on boot.

Please reach out to your hardware vendor if you have detected an issue with misidentification of devices.

For HPE P4800X SSDs, please see HPE advisory: https://support.hpe.com/hpesc/public/docDisplay?docId=a00111616en_us&docLocale=en_US

Workaround:
None

Additional Information

Impact/Risks:
Devices that are identified incorrectly can lead to potential hardware compatibility concerns and incorrect use.