You are not able to see more than 8 HBA when using qlnativefc driver

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi
• VMware vSphere ESXi 7.0
• VMware vSphere ESXi 8.0

Issue/Introduction

The driver is correctly installed but you can see only 8 HBA.

You can see the following error in the /var/log/boot or /var/log/boot.gz
Heap qlnativefc-dma already at its maximum size. Cannot expand.

Cause

For configurations that require more memory, such as max 8 adapters in the system, the driver heap size must be increased.
The default heap size is 128MB

Resolution

Increase the heapsize to 512 with this command:

esxcli system module parameters set -m qlnativefc -p ql2xmaxheapsize=0x20000000

For more details read Page 19 of:
https://www.marvell.com/content/dam/marvell/en/public-collateral/fibre-channel/marvell-fibre-channel-cna-adapters-qlogic-series-vmware-user-guide.pdf