Long title know right……. I thought it was worth me creating a post around the latest article from HPe. This is affecting quite a few of my VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) customers and the HPe messaging on the actual problem is not very good. I have customers all over Europe and many are being told different things than the central HPe engineering have communicated to VMware.
I am a vSAN customer and this article is confusing, it say disks in RAID-0 and passthrough are not affected, and my HPe account director has said it doesn’t affect me and to stay on the SPP/firmware and driver I am running.
This is the most asked question I am getting asked. Whereas I can’t realy comment on the number of customers that may or may not have been affected by this, the fact is HPe removed the 1.98/1.99 firmware from GA. As a customer this would be a red alert for me. There are fundamental problems with this firmware that have resulted in it being removed from GA!!!
Also if you are a vSAN customer you MUST move onto the recommend vSAN combination of 2.65 firmware and the 1.04 driver for ESXi that is detailed in the article……. hang on HPe have said it doesn’t affect me on vSAN, but the article is saying I need to move to a different firmware and driver combo.!!!!
My vSAN health check on the vCenter UI and the VCF pre-reqs checker are saying I am running an uncertified driver and firmware combination. I didn’t have this when I upgraded last time.
As I detailed above, HPe removed this from GA. And as a result VMware would have removed this from the vSAN HCL. VMware cannot be expected to support their software on a firmware and driver combination that HPe have deemed so unstable that they have removed it from GA. This was not handled well by either VMware of HPe with both of them just removing it overnight and customers only seeing this when they run checks on the environment, maybe before a change or upgrade.
Do I upgrade the firmware or the driver first?
This is a valid question, the HPe SPP bundle that contains this firmware uplift, also has a number of other firmware uplifts in it as well. The HPE site https://techhub.hpe.com/us/en/enterprise/docs/index.aspx?doc=/eginfolib/synergy/sw_release_info/index.html the link shows that the version of the SPP that is needed is ONLY supported on the HPe ESXi build titled May 2020. And this release is a simple 6.7 U3 release. This to me shows that the new driver in this build (1.04) is not compatible with the 1.99 firmware. And as a result the firmware would need to be upgraded before the driver. This would be good to check with you HPe representative.
How does this work with VCF? how to I update the ISO with the patches for VCF 3.10 onwards?
This is the most common question and I am going to do another article on how to do this.
VirtualIze Me 