After upgrading HP-Gen8 servers with Gen9, few of us had faced an issue where the host was unable to connect to storage. Whereat the same time Gen8 hosts can connect to the same storage without any issue.
Gen9 servers come with Qlogic FCoE HBAs compared to Gen8 servers which had FC HBAs. With the latest drivers after installation host is not able to discover the FCoE HBAs.
After configuring FCoE on the switch size, the manual discovery was successful. The host was able to see the storage. But after reboot host was not able to discover the HBAs and Storage.
“Why Manual discovery was required?”
Older version of the driver’s autodiscovery was enabled by default. Which is why the host was able to discover the FCoE storage without any manual intervention. In the resent driver versions autodiscovery option has been disabled.
Why Auto discovery set to disable by default?
The parameter helps discover FCoE adapters and the storage. It works event when FCoE is not configured on the host. Which may lead to resource crunch or deadlocks. Hence the default value of the parameter was set to disable.
How to get it working for the FCoE environment?
Newer drivers are equipped with the configurable parameter “bnx2fc_autodiscovery”.
Modifying the values for the parameter:
esxcli system module parameters set --module bnx2fc --parameter-string bnx2fc_autodiscovery=1Or
esxcfg-module -s bnx2fc_autodiscovery=1 bnx2fc