ESXi 6.0 not detecting BROCADE HBA adapter

Steps:

  1. Make sure HBA is connected on the PCI slot and visible under esx hardware list:
  2. Check if VMKernel can detect any storage via Fibre Channel
    (output will be blank line if HBA driver is missing but HBA appears to be in PCI card determined from step 1)
  3. Search and download the relevant ESXi drivers for HBAthe recommended driver (bfa) version for 82B in ESXi 5.1 is 3.0.0.0
    You can download it from the following URL.
    https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/details?downloadGroup=DT-ESXi50-BROCADE-bfa-3000&productId=229
  4. Download the driver and install it using following instructions:

New Installation

For new installs, you should perform the following steps:

  1. Copy the VIB to the ESX server.  Technically, you can place the file anywhere that is accessible to the ESX console shell, but for these instructions, we’ll assume the location is in ‘/tmp’. Here’s an example of using the Linux ‘scp’ utility to copy the file from a local system to an ESX server located at 10.10.10.10:
  2. Issue the following command (full path to the VIB must be specified):

In the example above, this would be:

Note: Depending on the certificate used to sign the VIB, you may need to change the host acceptance level.  To do this, use the following command:

Also, depending on the type of VIB being installed, you may have to put ESX into maintenance mode.  This can be done through the VI Client, or by adding the ‘–maintenance-mode’ option to the above esxcli command.

Upgrade Installation

The upgrade process is similar to a new install, except the command that should be issued is the following:

Reboot host.

Now you should have the HBA should the datastores.