Naming convention for SATA devices can cause an ESXi scripted upgrade to fail

Products

• VMware vCenter Server

Issue/Introduction

Each storage device, or LUN, can be identified through one of the device naming formats - naa.* or t10.*. A hard disk, connected to Intel Corporation Patsburg SATA IDE Controller on prme-hwe-drv-stor-050, uses the device naming model of t10.* on an ESXi host version 6.0 and the naa.* naming convention on ESXi 6.5.
For example:

• For ESXi 6.0: The storage device is named t10.ATA___OCZ2DVERTEX3______________________OCZ2D7QJYOXH1096UQ093.
• For ESXi 6.5: The same device is named naa.5e83a97a37090996.

When the --disk= or --drive= options specify the T10 format device identifier, a scripted upgrade of the ESXi host to version 6.5 fails because the device cannot be found.

Note: The naming convention for the upper ports of an Intel Corporation Patsburg SATA IDE Controller differs from ESXi 6.0 to ESXi 6.5. On ESXi 6.0 the upper port names are in the range of vmhba32- vmhba63 while on ESXi 6.5, the range is from vmhba64 to vmhba95. For example, vmhba34 storage controller on ESXi 6.0 is named vmhba64 on ESXi 6.5.

Environment

VMware vCenter Server 6.5.x

Resolution

You must use the naa.* style name with the --disk= or --drive= options.

To locate the naa.* names, boot the installer ISO. The new names are listed in the disk selection menu.