Category: Virtualization

Here is the general idea of the issue – with vSAN 6.7~ you cannot mix SAS / SATA Drives when using a P420i Raid controller with a DL360 Gen8. 

I first thought it was vSAN only, but I also could not create a regular VMFS 5/6 datastore on the SATA Volumes (SAS worked fine for VMFS and for vSAN)

The Error I got from VMware vSphere was very generic, so here it is:

A general system error occurred: Failed to reserve disk naa.5002538da03397d4 with exception: Failed to reserve disk naa.5002538da03397d4 with exception: Reserve failed with error code: -1

Operation failed, diagnostics report:  Unable to create Filesystem, please see VMkernel log for more details: Failed to create VMFS on device naa.5002538da03397…

I got around this by installing an H240 HBA controller that doesnt have any issues, and it appears on the VMware HCL. 

After VMware basically gave up up on this ticket I was able to figure out that if you want to get the NC523SFP 10GBe adapter to work in ESXi 6.5+ you need to manually add this VIB driver, not the one that VMware has listed.

https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/detail.php?deviceCategory=io&productid=19404

I have confirmed that this updated driver “qlcnic version 6.1.191” works with ESXi 6.5 on an DL360 Gen8 with 1 x NC523SFP running firmware version 4.20.1 (4.20.20 is not available anymore from HPE as far as I know) This is the fix for the issue below (but I’m not going to post on that horrid website)

This fix should apply to any system running the NC523SFP Network Adapter.

https://www.experts-exchange.com/questions/29018082/VMWare-ESXi-6-5-HP-NC523SFP-10GbE-issues.html

Hopefully this post will help someone save a few hours of troubleshooting.