VCF 9.1 Upgrade Blocked: vSAN I/O Controller Hardware Compatibility Failure

Products

• VMware vSAN

Issue/Introduction

The VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1 upgrade process fails during the pre-check stage, blocking the management domain upgrade. The VCF Installer reports a hardware compatibility failure during the validation phase.

Error Message The following error is observed in the VCF Installer pre-check logs for the affected host

Hardware device compatibility check for the host. Adaptec SmartHBA 2100-8i: Device is incompatible with the cluster's target base image version (ESXi 9.1).

Environment

• VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) 9.1
• ESXi 9.1
• Adaptec SmartHBA 2100-8i (CP2100-8i) vSAN I/O Controller

Cause

• The Adaptec SmartHBA CP2100-8i I/O controller is certified for vSAN 9.0 environments but lacks the necessary HCL certification for vSAN 9.1.
  
  
• Hardware Compatibility List (HCL) compliance is a mandatory prerequisite for VCF upgrades; the VCF Installer validation mechanism enforces this check to ensure cluster supportability.

Resolution

There is no supported resolution to bypass the hardware compatibility pre-check for VCF 9.1 upgrades. The upgrade process cannot proceed until the controller model is formally certified for the target version.

1. Verify the current compatibility status of the controller in the VMware Compatibility Guide.
   
   
2. Plan the upgrade for a maintenance window after the hardware has achieved the necessary certification for ESXi 9.1.
   
   
3. If the controller is not listed as compatible, contact your hardware vendor for the latest certification timeline.

Note : There are no supported workarounds for this incompatibility. Attempts to suppress this error via the following methods are unsupported and will not resolve the pre-check failure:

• Silencing vSAN HCL alarms via the vSphere UI (as documented in KB 427403 ).
  
  
• Modifying application-prod.properties to skip pre-checks (as documented in KB 336414 ).