We have probably all been there at one point while messing around with ESXi and certain types of hardware. You get your ESXi host installed and configured and it seems to work fine until you look at the Health Status section of the host configuration and notice that you can see mostly all of your hardware, except for the peice that is most likely to fail, your storage. Now normally, well, with HP anyway, you can install the provided offline packages in order to get the hardware to appear, however in my experiences with Dell after installing their Server Administrator software and their Open Manage bundles the storage was still no where to be found.
Well, here's the deal. The adapter that I was specifically trying to report on was a PERC H700. Now most of the Dell PERC controllers are based off of a MegaRAID chipset (answer is always a Google search away) and you can confirm this by running 'esxcfg-scsidevs -a' to show the following output about your hba's.
So, off to LSI's site I headed to have a look for a VIB that might give me the information I need to see about my storage. I ended up pulling down a vib designed for the MegaSAS 9260. There are many ways to install a vib into ESXi but since I already had established an SSH session on my host I decided to use esxcli. After transferring the vib file to your host you can install it via the CLI by running the following command. I thought I was home free here…
esxcli software vib install -v /tmp/name_of_vib
Now this returned the following error…
'Could not find a trusted signer.' – a quick look at the help for for vib install I seen that there was a –no-sig-check option that could be attached to the command. Honestly, I'm not sure what the implications of running with 'no sig check' are, but I forged ahead anyways. If i ever get some time I'll try and do a little reading and update this post with some valid information around skipping the signature check. Either way, running the command again with the –no-sig-check (below) will get the job done for you…
esxcli software vib install -v /tmp/name_of_vib –no-sig-check
So, a quick reboot after the fact and voila! Disk information.
So, there you have it, finally I can see my storage 🙂 Once again, comments, concerns, questions are always welcome in the boxes below….
Hi – You should see the vib listed under the management software section on the following page… http://www.lsi.com/support/Pages/Download-Results.aspx?productcode=P00044&assettype=0&component=Storage%20Component&productfamily=RAID%20Controllers&productname=MegaRAID%20SAS%209260-4i
Hi – you can have a look at the ghetto Health check script for the VMA – It will send an email to your with a whole bunch of info. I’ve actually modified it a while back to just send me the email if I have a hardware health issue….maybe a good idea for the next post 🙂 Thanks,
I know this is a little old – but you helped me out. Any idea on why 2 of 9 R710 servers storage would be missing in esxi? Everything is the same but these 2 don’t show storage. Could it be the others have the H700 Integrated and these 2 have the H700 adapter? I an not even 100% sure none of the others also don’t have adapters vs integrated but I am going nuts trying to narrow this down.
Sorry for the late reply – I’m assuming you have worked this out by now but the first thing I would check is ESXi builds as well as driver versions – find out what is different