NVMe and SCSI adapter's WWNN and WWPN are the same for FC HBA devices in ESXi 7.0 and later

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

This article provides information that this is an expected behavior, as the same port is for NVMe and SCSI adapter, so it will display same WWNN and WWPN.

Symptoms:

• For Marvell FC HBA device, the WWNN and WWPN are same for NVMe and SCSI adapter.
• You see it listed similar to:
  
  vmhba3  qlnativefc_unstablelink-up   fc.2000f4e9d454acac:2100f4e9d454acac    (0000:05:00.0) QLogic Corp QLE2772 Dual Port 32GFC PCIe Gen4 x8 Adapter
  vmhba4  qlnativefc_unstablelink-up   fc.2000f4e9d454acad:2100f4e9d454acad    (0000:05:00.1) QLogic Corp QLE2772 Dual Port 32GFC PCIe Gen4 x8 Adapter
  vmhba64 qlnativefc_unstablelink-up   fc.2000f4e9d454acac:2100f4e9d454acac    (0000:05:00.0) QLogic Corp QLE2772 Dual Port 32GFC PCIe Gen4 x8 Adapter
  vmhba65 qlnativefc_unstablelink-up   fc.2000f4e9d454acad:2100f4e9d454acad    (0000:05:00.1) QLogic Corp QLE2772 Dual Port 32GFC PCIe Gen4 x8 Adapter

Environment

VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0.x

Resolution

This is an expected behavior.

Workaround:
When using the qlnativefc Driver, to work around this issue if you do not want to use NVMe devices:

 

1. Set the parameter by running this command:

esxcfg-module -s 'ql2xnvmesupport=0' qlnativefc


2. Then reboot. This disables NVMe support. 

Note: Marvell FC NVMe adapter and NVMe LUN devices which connected to adapter will not be accessed.

When using the lpfc Driver, to work around this issue if you do not want to use NVMe devices:

 

1. Set the parameter by running this command:

esxcli system module parameters set -m lpfc -p lpfc_enable_fc4_type=1


2. Then reboot. This disables NVMe support. 

Note: This workaround for lpfc was identified in the following Dell EMC documentation, but issue has also been observed on HP 3PAR -

* PowerStoreOS 2.0: ESXi hosts do not detect direct attached fibre channel volumes | Dell Bahamas
https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-bs/000193380/direct-attached-fiber-channel-volumes-are-not-detected-by-esxi-host-in-powerstore-2-0

* HPE documentation is in progress

 

Note: Force reboot of server from command line (reboot -f) may result in not updating the changes.  Perform a graceful reboot using UI.  
Alternately,  we can backup the changes using 'sbin/auto-backup.sh', prior to using CLI command "reboot -f"