Michael Mikheev at VM4RU has an excellent post about doing something I did a long time ago – and never documented. He’s got the method to enable QLogic’s cheapie HBA (QLE220) to work as an HBA in ESX. What I’m doing now, is no more than simple translation work from Andrey Vakhitov’s document hosted at the above site:
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Instructions for installing the QLE220 HBA into ESX 3.5
1. After installing ESX, we see that the QLE220 does not appear in the VI client as an HBA:
2. Check /etc/vmware/esx.conf. There should be an entry for «Qlogic Corp: …». We need to know the values for: «vendor, devID, subsysVendor, subsysDevID».
3. The HBA will work with the native qla2300_707_vmw.o driver, so edit /etc/vmware/pciid/qla2300_707_vmw.xml.
4. Edit the file with the «QLE220» information, using the values in (2)
5. Run esxcfg-pciid. This utility will use /etc/vmware/pciid/*.xml and will update the following files: «pci.ids, pcitable, pcitable.Linux, vmware-devices.map» and will add the required values from (2) into «pci.xml».
6. Reboot the ESX host
7. Voila!:
8. After reboot, the configuration also gets added to «simple.map».
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All done – and you can do this with other devices the driver provides for but VMware does not support.
Thanks to Andrey Vakhitov for his hard work.
Cheers,
Leo
Hi,
Just to update that in Vsphere ESX 4.0 the esx.conf file doesn’t have the Qlogic Corp: … Unknown device line…
But if you just add the …… in the file qla2xxx.xml
It works !
Serpins
Serpins,
Could you elaborate a little more on your comment? Where is the file you’re referencing? Could you detail
Instructions for installing the QLE220 HBA into ESX4
1. edit /etc/vmware/pciid/qla2xxx.xml and add following:
qla2xxx
QLE220
2. Run esxcfg-pciid
3. reboot
4. Voila!
hmmm, where is my pasted text?
1. edit /etc/vmware/pciid/qla2xxx.xml:
a) copy & paste a section -device-
b) edit device id to “5432″
c) edit -name- to QLE 220
2. Run esxcfg-pciid
3. reboot
4. Voila!
Hi there,
Thats it effemmess!
Now another challenge
Change the ESXi or ESX DVD install soo the initrd kernel could
see the QLE220 in the installation process to make boot from SAN..
I already changed the initrd, pci.ids, qlaxxx driver…
I’m having troubles in how to make the ISO again….last step.
Serpins
Serpins / Eddemmess,
Did you get this working on ESXi 4.0? I have done this on 3.5 ESX, but this is my first attempt at the free version. In my pciid directory there are no existing xml files as there were in my ESX3.5 version.
But I went ahead and copied a working QLA2700 xml file from another host and then ran the esxcfg-pciid and rebooted. Still don’t show up under storage adapters.
Hi Ryan,
I didn’t tried in ESXi only ESX 3.5U4 and ESX 4.
I don’t know the directory structure of the free edition.
Best Regards
Serpins
Leo, thanks for posting this!
I’ve got a couple of ESX 3.5 hosts in our lab environment. I had a couple QLE220s reclaimed from a Windows box and wanted to try them out in the lab for connecting to CX series FC SAN and this worked, first time! Thanks again for posting this.
-Jim