Huawei IN300 FC HBA Adapters Are Not Detected After Upgrading to ESXi 8.x

Products

• VMware vSphere ESXi

Issue/Introduction

• .After upgrading an ESXi host from version 7.x to 8.x, the Huawei IN300 16Gb Fibre Channel HBA adapters are no longer detected or displayed in the vSphere Client. As a result, the storage LUNs and datastores associated with these adapters become inaccessible.
• Although the PCI devices remain visible through the ESXi CLI, no compatible driver is bound to the adapters after the upgrade.

         [root@HOSTNAME:~] lspci | grep -i huawei
          0000:60:00.0 Serial bus controller Fibre Channel: Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Hi1822 SP520 (2*16G FC)
         Class 0c04: 19e5:0203

         0000:61:00.0 Serial bus controller Fibre Channel: Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd. Hi1822 SP520 (2*16G FC)

Environment

VMware Esxi 8.x

Cause

The issue is caused by a hardware compatibility limitation with the ESXi 8.x architecture. The Huawei IN300 (Hi1822 SP520) Fibre Channel adapter is neither certified nor listed in the VMware Compatibility Guide (HCL) for ESXi 8.x, resulting in the absence of a supported driver binding after the upgrade.

Resolution

Workaround:
Rollback to ESXi 7.0 U3: To restore storage connectivity immediately, reinstall or rollback the affected hosts to ESXi 7.0 U3, which remains the last supported version for the hifc driver and Huawei IN300 hardware.

Permanent Fix:

1. Hardware Refresh: Replace the Huawei IN300 adapters with an HBA model that is officially certified for ESXi 8.x.
2. Verification: Always verify hardware and driver compatibility using the Broadcom Compatibility Guide prior to performing major version upgrades.