Unable to find the disk slot from the ESXi host ssh session with error: Unable to get location for device naa. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx: No device info or fail to read the info!

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

Using the below command reports the following error when we are trying to get the physical slot of the impacted drive:

[esxi:~] localcli storage core device physical get -d naa. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Errors:
Unable to get location for device naa. xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx: No device info or fail to read the info!

Environment

VMware vSAN 7.x

VMware vSAN 8.x

Cause

The commands may not work with certain drivers as the vSAN disk serviceability plugin is not coded for all drivers.

The current supported list is below:
hpsa
nhpsa
iavmd
nvme_pcie
lsi_mr3
lsi_msgpt3
lsi_msgpt35
smartpqi 

If the vSAN adapters driver is not listed, then the hardware vendor has to open a engineering to engineering case so we can work together to update the plugin code to interface with those drivers.

You may also see one of the below errors if your driver is not listed above when running these commands which reflects we can't interact with the device to either pull the required information or turn on/off the LED:

esxcli storage core device physical get -d naa.6589cfc########93491
Unable to get location for device naa.6589cfc########93491: No LSU plugin can manage this device.

esxcli storage core device raid list -d naa.5000########4c2f
Unable to get location for device naa.5000########4c2f: Can not manage device!

Resolution

Ran the below command to get the target details of the impacted physical drive:

#esxcfg-mpath -bd naa.58ce########aad9
naa.58cexxxxxxxxaad9 : VMware Serial Attached SCSI Disk (naa.58cexxxxxxxxaad9)
vmhba1:C0:T1:L0 LUN:0 state:active sas Adapter: 5005########8c11 Target: 5000########02af

Navigating to the iDRAC, under Storage > Physical Disks, we were able to find the SAS address of one drive matching with the target ID of the drive collected from the above command:

From here, we will be able to identify the slot of the hard drive.