ESXi host lost the Datastores after patching/upgrade.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi
• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Issue/Introduction

After an ESXi patching or upgrade, the Fibre Channel connected datastores are not visible on the host in either the vCenter UI or the Host Client. In a cluster with shared storage, unpatched hosts will still have connectivity to the datastores

 

Cause

The driver and/or the firmware version installed are observed to be not compatible with the newly patched ESXi version. 

Steps to Validate: 

• Validated driver versions are listed at Broadcom Compatibility Guide.
• Current driver version can be found by running "esxcli software vib list | grep driver-name"
• Firmware details can be found from host BMC page (such as iLO, iDrac, etc)
• The ESXi host is not showing any HBAs in the CLI "esxcli storage core adapter list" or in the UI.

Resolution

Install the supported version of the driver:

1 - Refer to Determining Network/Storage firmware and driver version in ESXi to determine the IDs of the vmhbas in use.

Example: 

VID = 1000 ,DID = 0030, SVID = 15ad, SDID = 1976

2 - To check the supported versions of driver and firmware for the specific ESXi version, search the Broadcom Compatibility Guide for the Vendor ID (VID), Device ID (DID), Sub-Vendor ID (SVID), and Sub-Device ID (SDID) and select the version in use for the ESXi.

3 - If the issue is with the driver version:

3.a - Download a vib on a supported version.

Note: Go to Finding IO Drivers in the Broadcom Support Portal for driver download instructions.

3.b - Save the downloaded vib on a local datastore that the host is connected to or transfer it via SCP to the /tmp folder of the impacted host.

3.c - Install the new driver using one of the commands below depending on the extension:

esxcli software vib install -v /tmp/VIB-TO-INSTALL-NAME.vib
esxcli software vib install -d /tmp/VIB-TO-INSTALL-NAME.zip

3.d - After the installation is successfully completed, reboot the host for the change to take effect.

4 - If the issue is with the firmware version:

Upgrade the firmware of the HBA. If required, consult the hardware vendor. 

Additional Information

To quickly recover the host, rollback to the previous state by following Reverting to a previous version of ESXi 6.x, 7.x or 8.x 

Once rolled back, upgrade the driver / firmware as needed and restart the patching.