HomeLab Part 6: Install most recent driver for the LSI2308 controller

After I upgraded the onboard LSI controller to firmware P19 I recognized some strang behaviour. After a few days I saw that all of the disks connected to the LSI become inactive or better said APD (All Paths Down) as you can see in the following screenshot.

There was also the following Event message in the vCenter Server Tasks & Events:

Device or filesystem with identifier DISKIDENTIFIER has entered the All Paths Down state.

I check the driver version which was currently used by the ESXi host. To get the right driver which is used by the controller I used the following command:
esxcli storage core adapter list
You will then get this output showing that the SAS controller is using the mpt2sas driver.

Now that we know the driver name let’s check which driver version is installed. For that use this command:
esxcli software vib list | grep mpt2sas
As you can see the default ESXI driver for the mpt2sas is version 14.x.

To get the most recent driver you need to go to the vSphere ESXi Drivers & Tools site for the respective ESXi version. Under Driver CDs, I have searched for the driver name, in my case mpt2sas. The funny thing about the site is that as the most recent driver I got the 18.x version.

When continue to search you will find the current version which is 19.x.

As you can see the 19.x is older than the 18.x release, which is for me a little bit confusing, but nevermind I found the right version.
When you have downloaded and extracted the 19.x version zip you can find a doc folder under the extracted folder. There you will find the release notes. Here is a short extract from the release notes:

VMware ESXi5.5 GA support for the LSI mpt2sas SAS 6.0 Gb/s Controller(s)
Driver name and version: mpt2sas v19.00.00.00.1vmw
Compatible ESX version: VMware ESXi5.x
Dependencies:MPTFW-19.00.00.00 or versions above.

The last sentence is the most important one. When using FW 19.x you also need to use driver 19.x otherwise you could run into problems like mine.
To install the new vib I used this command:
esxcli software vib install –viburl file:/tmp/DRIVERVERSION.vib
–viburl file – defines the location of the vib file. I have uploaded the file to /tmp so that’s my path I used.
When the installation is completed you must reboot the ESXi host. After FW and driver version were the same, the problem with the APD behaviour disappeared.

Conclusion

Whenever you update a component with a new firmware check the corresponding driver if there are some dependencies which should be taken into account.