vSphere 7 Ate my HBA

vSphere 7 Ate my HBA

My whitebox uses a Supermicro Motherboard that has an Intel c612 chipset for it's SATA controllers. I was using these up to the upgrade for 7.0 without issue and an LSI MegaRaid 9271-8i before that. As I stated in my last Post, I upgraded vCenter fine but during the upgrade for ESXi 7.0 got a warning about PCI device compatibility. My storage all disappeared, so I searched for a HBA on eBay to give me the cheapest solution. This turned up anHPE H240 SATA/SAS Controller. I connected everything up and after ESXi Booted, still no Datastores....!!!

CRAP!!!!

Sometimes the HBA goes into RAID mode by default though. Normally on a HPE server you press F9 to get into the System BIOS and then the HBA bios can be accessed from there. I didn't see any such option on boot with the Supermicro. There are CLI VIBs for ESXi 6.7 available but another option is to use an Offline SSA (Smart Storage Administrator). I tried the one below:
https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/detail?swItemId=MTX_321a88714bff4279abf175b9bd
This version is dated Dec 2019 - I injected this ISO into the boot loader and waited to see what happened.....
Sure enough it was in RAID mode and my SSDs are not in a RAID set so I changed to HBA mode and rebooted. Note: I boot ESXi off USB and that was unaffected, thankfully!!

This is what ESXi saw after this change:

Looks good, only I have 4 x SSDs and all 4 were viewable in the SSA tool, so what happened the fourth SSD drive in ESXi?!! Getting closer though! I've also a Firmware update to apply so I'll install that and reboot and see what I can find out....
https://support.hpe.com/hpsc/swd/public/detail?swItemId=MTX_f20b99606f3f43f2b410a6d688
Extracted Zip and copied contents to my lab host and ran the following commands:

Now on reboot I'll load the SSA tool again and check my Motherboard Bios just to verify I can see all 4 x SSDs and identify which one is giving the problem.

Now in vCenter I can SEE it but it's not consumed.

I can format it now in vCenter, I wonder what was wrong with it?

That worked - use same name and all the ISO/Patch files on this Datastore were recovered and came back to life!!! Sorted!

Now, onto Discovering vSphere 7....!!