What happened? Why am I here?
If you are like me and ran into an issue when upgrading Dell VRTX chassis blades to vSphere 8, welcome to club. The issue wasn’t in installing the ESXI image (which itself went fine), but instead, there was an issue after the fact. The shared storage of the VRTX chassis did not show up after booting to ESXI 8. After taking a quick look, I discovered that the PERC8 card was not showing up in my storage adapters. Not great, since all my virtual machines were on said storage. Most often, this usually means there is a driver issue and wouldn’t you know, that was the case exactly.
Dell and VMware eluded to the fact that Dell VRTX wouldn’t be supported moving forward with the delayed release of drivers for vSphere 7 when it first launched and as of vSphere 8, it looks to be the case. The drivers required for the storage adapter are no longer present. Dell does not have a custom image and neither does VMware have these drivers for ESXI 8 images. The blades themselves are listed as compatible for vSphere 8, but not the chassis. So what to do now?
I began researching this and stumbled upon this post on Dell forums. A user by the name of “HannesF” provided a workaround that ended up saving the day. Listed below are the instructions I followed, all credit to this user on the Dell forum.
- WARNING: The following document contains steps/modifications that are not officially supported by Broadcom (VMware). Use at your own risk.
Manually load driver into ESXI
The drivers for the storage adapter from vSphere 7, appear to still work inside the new version as of ESXi 8.0 Update 3e. There are a few steps needed to be taken to load the driver into the OS:
1. Copy the old driver from your vSphere 7 ESXI host to your local machine. It can be found /bootbank directory and should be named “dellshar.v00”. You can use SCP to copy it over SSH or I have provided a download link to the driver file below:
2. Paste the driver file into your vSphere 8 EXI host using a similar method using SCP for example into the same directory (/bootbank).
3. Edit the boot.cfg file using VI. This is a requirement for the ESXI host to load the driver on boot. vi /bootbank/boot.cfg
--- s.v00 --- dellshar.v00 --- bnxtnet.v00Insert the driver before the bnxtnet.v00 driver in the fashion above. If you are new to VIM, hit “i” to enter edit mode, type out driver name and hyphens, hit “esc” to exit edit mode, and finally press “:wq” to write to the boot config file and exit Vi.
4. Reboot the ESXI host and the driver should appear and load. After that the shared storage should once again be visible. Repeat for any other ESXI hosts.
What is next? What should I do.
Since we know that Dell VRTX will no longer keep getting supported, it’s time to move on. Whether that means getting new hardware that does support the new vSphere version, or moving to a different hypervisor such as Hyper-V, Proxmox, or moving to the cloud entirely. In my opinion, it becomes harder and harder every day to be a Broadcom customer, and this is just a testament to that.
