I have come across this issue a couple of times now, and thought it would be a good idea to create a post around this slightly confusing topic.
VSAN Health has various warning and alerts which it can notify about, but today I will be discussing hardware compatibility.
Once we expand the warning we get a bit more information around what is happening.
So, it looks like these HBA don’t have the best firmware they could be to support VSAN. Although this isn’t a critical alert, it is definitely something we should address sooner rather than later.
But is this warning accurate…kind of .
Let’s take a look at VMware’s Hardware Compatibility site for this device
There are a couple things here to notice that is kind of odd. First thing to notice is the Device Driver column. Notice the latest driver here is 17.00.02.00. Scrolling to the right the Additional Firmware Version lists 15.17.09.06.
Just one row down though, an earlier Device Driver of 17.00.01.00 correlates to a newer Firmware Version of 16.17.0.03. Doesn’t this seem odd? Well lets look at the same info for ESXi 7.0
Everything looks fairly similar, except we notice that a newer Driver of 17.00.10.00 matches the exact same Additional Firmware version of 15.17.0.06 as the last driver we were just looking at which was 17.00.02.00.
It doesn’t quite make sense to me that a older driver only supports newer firmware, and vice versa.
Anyway enough examining the host compatibility page. Let’s see what we have on the host. Logging into a host and running a quick command we see what Drivers we have.
It looks like we are running the latest driver supported, and the firmware version per the earlier is slightly older but still supported. So although there is a warning, per the hardware compatibility it is fine, but maybe VMware would like to be that firmware version to be a little newer.
At the end of the day it seems like everything is “fine” for now, but it should be monitored in case there are any changes to the driver/firmware in the future.
Hope this helps!
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