Today I upgraded some HP BL460c Gen9 Blade Servers from ESXi 6.0 to ESXi 6.5. I always reinstall when going from 5.5 to 6.0 or 6.0 to 6.5, so After the server was done installing I found that the FCoE adapters and datastores was missing.
The servers are connected to some HP 3PAR storage using HP FlexFabric 10Gb 2-port 536FLB Adapters.
To regain access to your storage you need to enable the FCoE adapters using the esxcli command.
Enable SSH on your host, and start a ssh sessions to your host. You can start ssh service on your host either through the gui, or using Powercli command:
# Get your host object
$VMHost = Get-VMHost <Hostname>
# Start SSH Service on your host
$VMHost | Get-VMHostService | Where-Object { $_.Key -eq "TSM-SSH" } | Start-VMHostService
Enable FCoE Adaptors using these commands:
# List your adapters esxcli fcoe nic list # Enable them esxcli fcoe nic enable -n <adapter name> # Enable discovery esxcli fcoe nic discover -n <adapter name>
When you are done stop SSH service again with PowerCLI command:
# Get your host object
$VMHost = Get-VMHost <Hostname>
# Stop SSH Service on your host
$VMHost | Get-VMHostService | Where-Object { $_.Key -eq "TSM-SSH" } | Stop-VMHostService
Please leave any comments below.
Thanks for this post, we have the same issue with ESXi 6.5 but are using Auto Deploy. Enabling the FCoE adapter works temporarily but isn’t persistent at reboot as we are using a stateless install. Any ideas how we can get around this? The firmware and bnx2fc driver versions are correct corresponding with the hardware compatibility guide. Thanks.
I have not been able to find it in the Host Profile. I would recommend that you create a SR on the issue.
One approach you could take was to control Auto Deploy using Orchestrator. That way your could wait for the host to come up. Enable the adapters and rescan your storage.
Maybe someone else has a better solution.