ESXi 6.5 FCoE Adapters Missing

After installing or upgrading to ESXi 6.5 FCoE adapters and datastores are missing. In this case the hardware in use is a HP ProLiant BL460c Gen9 server with HP FlexFabric 10Gb 2-port 536FLB adapters, although this seems to have been a problem for other vendors (see here) and versions too.

This issue should be resolved with a driver provided by the vendor which has the FCoE auto discovery on boot parameter enabled. Cross reference your hardware against the VMware Hardware Compatibility Guide here, and confirm you are using the correct version of the bnx2fc driver and firmware. If no updated driver is available from the vendor then review the workarounds outlined below.

Stateful Installs

Credit to this article, SSH onto the host and run the following commands.

esxcli fcoe adapter list lists the discovered FCoE adapters, at this stage there will be no results.

esxcli fcoe nic list lists the adapters available as potential FCoE candidates. Locate the name of the adapter.

esxcli fcoe nic enable -n vmnicX enables the adapter, replace vmnicX with the adapter name, for example vmnic2.

esxcli fcoe nic discover -n vmnicX enables discovery on the adapter, replace vmnicX with the adapter name.

esxcli fcoe adapter list lists the discovered FCoE adapters, you should now see the FCoE adapters listed.

The storage adapters should now be showing in the vSphere web client, however if you are using stateless installs with Auto Deploy, then this workaround is not persistent and is lost at reboot.

Stateless Installs

Credit to this article, we were able to create a custom script bundle to enable discovery on the FCoE adapters as part of the deploy rule with the steps below. Custom script bundles open up a lot of possibilities with Auto Deploy, but at this stage they are CLI only. I also noticed that if you create a deploy rule with a script bundle from the CLI, although it shows in the GUI if you then edit that rule in the GUI (for something unrelated, e.g. updated host profile) then it removes the script bundle without warning. So this is something you would need to weigh up against your environment, if you are already using CLI to configure deploy rules it shouldn’t be a problem.

PowerCLI can now be installed directly through PowerShell, if you don’t already have PowerCLI installed see here.

• First up we’ll need to create the script on a Linux / Unix system. I just used a test ESXi host we had kicking about over SSH. Type vi scriptname.sh replacing with an appropriate name for your script.
• The file will open, type i to begin editing.
• On the first line enter #!/bin/ash followed by the relevant enable and discover commands from the section above. You can see in the example below the commands for enabling vmnic2 and vmnic3 as FCoE adapters.

• Press escape to leave the text editor and type :wq to save changes to the file and close.
• Next we need to create the script bundle that will be imported into Auto Deploy. Type tar -cvzf bundlename.tgz scriptname.sh

• Copy the script bundle with the .tgz extension to your local machine, or the computer from where you will be using PowerCLI to create the deploy rule. In my case I copied the file over with WinSCP.
• You should also have an ESXi image in zip format, make a note of the location. Add the script bundle and the ESXi software depot by running the following commands Add-ScriptBundle location\bundlename.tgz and Add-EsxSoftwareDepot location\file.zip. If you need further assistance with building custom images or using PowerCLI to manage Auto Deploy see the VMware Auto Deploy 6.x Guide and How to Create Custom ESXi Images posts.

• Build the deploy rule using your own variables, again if you’re already using Auto Deploy I’m assuming you know this bit, we’re just adding an additional item in for the script bundle. See the guide referenced above if you need assistance creating deploy rules. I have used:
  • New-DeployRule -Name "Test Rule" -Item "autodeploy-script","HPE-ESXi-6.5.0-Build-5146846", LAB_Cluster, -Pattern "ipv4=192.168.0.101" | Add-DeployRule

• The deploy rule is created and activated, I can now see it in the Auto Deploy GUI in the vSphere web client, with the associated script bundle. When the host boots from the deploy rule the script is extracted and executed, and the FCoE adapters are automatically enabled and discovered on boot.

• If you don’t use the | Add-DeployRule parameter then the deploy rule will be created but show inactive. You can activate using the GUI but do not edit the rule using the GUI or the script bundle will break.
• If you are updating an existing image then don’t forget to remove cached rules by remediating host associations, under the Deployed Hosts tab.