Can I upgrade my HBA? (ESXi 7.0 related)

[zeebee]

Hi all,

I've been running my first FreeNAS server under ESXi for about 5 months now with much success (after much help from this community!).

Today I thought I might try and upgrade ESXi from 6.7U3 to 7.0. I was aware there was some legacy hardware support removed in ESXi 7.0 (VMKlinux drivers?), but the hardware for my server was all bought new, so I thought I might be ok.

However, the installer tells me my host has unsupported hardware: [pciinfo 1000:0072 1000:3040]
By the looks of it, this represents my HBA card: https://pci-ids.ucw.cz/read/PC/1000/0072/10003040
https://www.broadcom.com/products/storage/host-bus-adapters/sas-9210-8i

I'm happy to stay on 6.7 indefinitely, but I'm interested in whether there's any complications with upgrading my HBA.

Assuming I find one that is supported by ESXi 7.0, can I just swap it out, configure the passthrough on the VM, and FreeNAS will just see the drives as before?

Or does FreeNAS somehow rely on the way the HBA presents the drives to recognize them, so upgrading becomes painful?

Thanks for your help as always!

 

[Yorick]

FreeNAS uses the GPT GUID to identify a drive in a pool. That means it doesn’t care which controller that drive is on. You can safely swap that HBA.

You may also be able to keep the HBA - you are passing it through and don’t need a VMWare driver. If VMWare gives you the option to acknowledge the warning and continue, that is.

Looks like the entire 2000 line was ditched, there is some support still for 3008, and then of course the 9200 line is supported.

 

[zeebee]

FreeNAS uses the GPT GUID

Thanks Yorick, that’s great news, I was hoping it did something like that. Even if I don’t upgrade that’s useful to know for the future.

You may also be able to keep the HBA - you are passing it through and don’t need a VMWare driver.

Ahh interesting. How confident are you about that? I don’t have any reason to think so, but I kind of assumed it’d need the driver to pass it through. The installer flagged the unsupported hardware as a warning, and I’m pretty sure it gave me the option to continue.

Looks like the entire 2000 line was ditched, there is some support still for 3008, and then of course the 9200 line is supported.

Sorry, I’m confused by this. Isn’t mine in the 9200 line?

Thanks!

 

[Yorick]

Maybe I'm confused as to what is and isn't still supported, I was just scrolling through the LSI hardware list on the VMWare site on a phone screen :).

I am not terribly confident about "you don't need a VMWare driver for the device" - it makes sense to me as you're passing the whole thing through. You could check on 6.7, see on CLI whether VMWare loaded an LSI driver for that device.

 

[zeebee]

Yorick, it was a bit of a bumpy road, but you were right. I upgraded to ESXi 7.0, ignoring the warning. All my VMs started up, except FreeNAS. To fix it, I had to re-enable passthrough on the HBA (it had been turned off by the upgrade), and then remove and re-add the PCI device from the FreeNAS VM settings. After that, it boots and FreeNAS continued along perfectly. Thanks for your help!

 

[moosport2]

I had the same problem when I tried to upgrade to 7.0. So the HBA still show up in the device list to allow pass through even though it is not supported?

good to know. I have a SAS 9300 on the way to replace the old M1015

 

[fabrix67]

Hi all,
is there someone of you who has tried esxi 7.0 with LSI SAS controller in passthrough? is it working? Can you better explain how?
Thanks for your help!

 

[fabrix67]

UP

 

[zeebee]

So the HBA still show up in the device list to allow pass through even though it is not supported?

@moosport2, @fabrix67 - here's how mine appears in ESXi 7.0 on the Manage/Hardware page:

It's working great for me, no problems so far. The steps I took were:

1. Booted ESXi 7.0 installer from USB
2. Selected 'Upgrade/Preserve data' or whatever the option is
3. After upgrade, booted ESXi 7.0
4. Passthrough for my LSI device in Manage/Hardware had been disabled, so I re-enabled it and rebooted
5. Removed the device from my FreeNAS VM and re-added it
6. Now it's working great!

 

[zeebee]

@moosport2 - after rebooting my ESXi server yesterday, it once again forgot what my LSI 9210-8i was. I followed the same procedure I outlined above and it's working again, but I decided I should upgrade to avoid this problem in the future.

I've ordered an LSI 9300-8i to replace it (plus new cables, seems there's a new connector, arrgg!). Can you tell me - have you installed yours yet, and did it work ok with FreeNAS? No problems flashing it into IT mode etc?