Dell HBA355i adapter missing after ESXi 8.0 upgrade

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

After upgrading an ESXi host from 7.0 U3 to 8.0 U3, the Dell HBA355i adapter (vmhba) is not visible in the storage core device list (esxcli storage core device list) or the boot logs (/var/run/log/boot.log).

Upgrading or downgrading the lsi_msgpt35 driver and adapter firmware does not restore adapter visibility.

Environment

VMware ESXi 8.x

Cause

When you configure a PCIe device for passthrough, the ESXi VMkernel intentionally gives up control of that specific hardware. This feature allows a Virtual Machine to directly access the physical PCIe device, entirely bypassing the hypervisor's storage stack.

Because the hypervisor is explicitly instructed to ignore the device:

• The native VMkernel driver (e.g. lsi_msgpt35) unbinds from the adapter.

• The storage claiming process skips the device, preventing the assignment of a vmhba alias.

• The adapter and its attached physical disks become completely invisible to the ESXi host; as a result, they cannot be used for VMFS datastores

Device passthrough configurations are permanently recorded in the host's configuration file (/etc/vmware/esx.conf). If this setting was toggled, either intentionally for a specific VM or accidentally via the UI, during the host's lifecycle on ESXi 7.x, that configuration persists through the upgrade process to 8.x.

Resolution

To resolve this issue, the passthrough state for the adapter must be disabled via the CLI:

1. Connect to the ESXi host via SSH.
   
   
2. Identify the PCI Device ID and confirm the passthrough state is enabled by running the following command:
   esxcli hardware pci pcipassthru list
   
   
3. Disable passthrough for the specific PCI Device ID:
   esxcli hardware pci pcipassthru set -d <PCI_Device_ID> -a -e=0
   
   
4. Reboot the ESXi host to allow the VMkernel to reclaim the hardware component, bind the lsi_msgpt35 driver, and restore the storage adapter alias.