NVMe disks are not detected post ESXi host's motherboard replacement

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

Host had its motherboard replaced, post this activity no NVMe disks are detected in ESXi upon boot. 

Devices are seen in KVM/iDrac as healthy, online and operational. Correct NVMe driver is installed on ESXi host also.

 

 

Environment

vSAN 7.x, vSAN 8.x

Cause

ACPI _CRS definition of the root-bridge includes the bus range that should enumerate NVMe drives (vmhbaX's). In certain situations, the buses below this root-bridge are unresponsive due to a problem during device probing. Presence of this issue can be confirmed by absence of 'PCI Express Root Complex Port' announcement in /var/run/log/boot logfile. 

Example of healthy 'PCI Express Root Complex Port' announcement on ESXi host that does not experience the issue ( via /var/run/log/boot):

2025-05-31T21:13:25.222Z cpu0:2097152)PCIE: 740: 0000:e2:02.0: PCIe v2 PCI Express Root Complex Port

Resolution

This is not a software / OS issue. 
Contact hardware vendor for further troubleshooting.