Hosts with a PERC H840 adapter installed is unable to view external SAN LUNs

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

The customer has installed a PERC H840 adapter in their server to facilitate communication with their SAN storage. The ESXi operating system has successfully recognized the adapter, and it is currently online with the most recent driver and firmware updates. However, despite these measures, the LUNs from the connected storage are not visible on the host server.

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Resolution

The PERC H840 adapter is a RAID controller that is designed to be used in conjunction with a JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) to create RAID groups using the PERC utility tool.

Image1: PERC H840 Raid Controller Connected to JBODs

It is important to note that the PERC H840 adapter is not capable of viewing LUNs (Logical Unit Numbers) from storage controllers. This is due to the fact that the Enhanced HBA mode, which is necessary for this functionality, is not supported on the PERC H840 RAID Controller.

Image2: Reference from Dell Manual

What is Enhanced HBA (eHBA)?

eHBA feature allows the adapter to function as HBA instead of a raid controller

Image3: Reference from Dell Manual

 

Resolution Step: 

It may be necessary for the hardware vendor (Dell) to provide a replacement adapter that either has the eHBA (Enhanced Host Bus Adapter) feature or is an HBA (Host Bus Adapter) card.
 

Note: 

For more detailed please read Dell Manual