Storage adapter (vmhba) is showing as offline on ESXi Host.

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• You may have multiple storage adapters and one or more are showing as Status Offline, as vmhba1 in the example below:

• You may have one or more hosts impacted.
• You may have had a power outage.
• Vmhbas may be online, but certain paths are offline. 
• You checked the driver and firmware versions installed for the impacted adapter and they are supported with the ESXi version installed in the host.

                      For reference on how to check the versions, please refer to Determining Network/Storage firmware and driver version in ESXi.

• You may have made recent changes in the fabric layer.
• A storage rescan was performed, but it didn't change the status of the adapter.
• The vmhba was reset from the ESXi with the command below, but the issue persists.
  • For FC:
    
    # esxcli storage san fc reset -A vmhbaX
     
  • For FCoE:
    
    # esxcli storage san fcoe reset -A vmhbaX

• A host reboot also was performed but it didn't resolve the issue.
  
  
  

Cause

This is an indication of issues beyond ESXi regarding the storage adapter or the fabric layer.

 

Resolution

Get the physical adapter checked and engage your fabric vendor to investigate and mitigate the issue.

Once the problem in the fabric layer is mitigated, the impacted hosts may need a reboot to refresh the information on the adapters.

 

If the adapter(s) and the fabric layer are validated as healthy by their vendors and the issue still persists, please open a ticket with VMware by Broadcom Technical Support.

Additional Information

Forcing a Fabric Login reset on Fibre Channel and FCOE Adapters