I received an email this week from one of my readers / followers on twitter who had gone through the effort of upgrading his LSI controller firmware. He shared the procedure with me as unfortunately it wasn’t well documented. I hope this will help others in the future, I know it will help me as I was about to look at the exact same for my VSAN environment, thanks for sharing this Tom!
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— copy / paste from Tom’s document —
ESXi: How to find HBA/NIC driver/Firmware version Allan Kjaer May 25, 2016 December 18, 2018 I have seen some problems when running the wrong driver version against firmware version, so here is a guide how to find the information you need to check compatability on ESXI 5.x and 6.0. VMware ESX Server 3.0.1 Driver CD for megaraidsas version 3.0.9 This is an ESX Server 3.0.1 Driver CD that enables support for LSI 1078 controller with version 3.0.9 of the megaraidsas driver. For detailed information about ESX Server hardware support, see the I/O Hardware Compatibility List.
We do quite a bit of virtualization and storage validation and performance testing in the Taneja Group Labs (http://tanejagroup.com/). Recently, we were performing some tests with VMware’s VSAN and due to some performance issues we were having with the AHCI controllers on our servers we needed to revise our environment to add some LSI SAS 2308 controllers and attach our SSD and HDDs to the LSI card. However our new LSI SAS controllers didn’t come with the firmware mandated by the VSAN HCL (they had v14 and the HCL specifies v18) and didn’t recognize the attached drives. So we set about updating LSI 2308 firmware. Updating the LSI firmware is a simple process and can be accomplished from an ESXi 5.5 U1 server but isn’t very well documented. After updating the firmware and rebooting the system the drives were recognized and could be used by VSAN. Below are the steps I took to update my LSI controllers from v14 to v18.
Updating a LSI 2308 Card on ESXi 5.5
Download the ESXi LSI firmware/BIOS installer from here: http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public/Host%20Bus%20Adapters/Host%20Bus%20Adapters%20Common%20Files/SAS_SATA_6G_P18/Installer_P18_for_Vmware_ESX50.zip
Download the LSI firmware/BIOS installer readme from here: http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public/Host%20Bus%20Adapters/Host%20Bus%20Adapters%20Common%20Files/SAS_SATA_6G_P18/README_Installer_P18_VMware_ESX50.txt
Download the v18 firmware / BIOS from the MSDOS package (9207_4i4e_Package_P18_IT_Firmware_BIOS_for_MSDOS_Windows) here: http://www.lsi.com/products/host-bus-adapters/pages/lsi-sas-9207-4i4e.aspx#tab/tab4
The MSDOS_Windows package is the only zip file that contains the firmware and BIOS packages 2118.bin is the firmware, mptsas2.rom is the BIOS file. Go to the ESXi commandline (using SSH or through the DCUI) and verify that the server has a LSI card installed:
List the drives attached:
Unzip the files that you downloaded and use SCP to upload the vib to the ESXi 5.5 server to the /tmp directory – SSH must be enabled on the ESXi server to use scp.
Place the server in maintenance mode:
Verify that the server is in maintenance mode:
The instructions from the readme gave an error code and did not install the vib:
The correct command to install the vib:
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Verify the installation of the vib:
List the BIOS and firmware version currently on the LSI card using the sas2flash command:
From the output we can see that the LSI card is at v 15.00. Install the firmware and BIOS using the sas2flash program that was installed from the vib:
Verify that that the card was updated to 18.00:
Reboot the system:
List the drives attached to the LSI card:
Take the host out of maintenance mode:
If you want to remove the vib:
I hope that helps people who need to upgrade their LSI controller firmware.
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