Upgrading to vSphere 7: A Lesson Learned on ESXi Driver Compatibility
As a home lab enthusiast, I’m always eager to test new software upgrades on my non-production systems. With the recent GA of vSphere 7, I decided to upgrade my homelab vCenter and ESXi host overnight. The vCenter upgrade went smoothly, but I encountered an issue after upgrading the ESXi host using the online bundle upgrade. All my VMs were listed as Invalid due to a lack of datastores in the configuration. This was attributed to the absence of a SATA adapter in the new version. After rolling back to the last known good configuration, I began researching ESXi 7 drivers for my SuperMicro SYS-5028D-TN4T and Intel-based Lynx Point AHCI controller. The VMware compatibility guide only showed drivers up to ESXi 6.7 Update 3, which made me think about the driver compatibility issue.
Back when I first set up this system around the time ESXi 6.5 was released, we encountered some performance issues related to the default VMware AHCI drivers. The fix at the time was to disable the default VMware AHCI drivers and use only the specific Intel ones. Fast forward to nearly three years later, and the default VMware drivers were still disabled on my system. So, I assumed that because the Intel drivers were only compatible up to ESXi 6.7, with the default VMware drivers disabled, there was no fallback option.
However, upon further research, I found an article by William Lam stating that the original performance issue was fixed in Update 1 of 6.5, and suggesting to re-enable the default VMware AHCI driver. Therefore, I decided to re-enable the drivers and reboot before trying the upgrade again. To my delight, the upgrade succeeded with all datastores listed this time!
This experience taught me an important lesson about ESXi driver compatibility, particularly for those with SuperMicro homelabs who may have disabled the default VMware AHCI driver in the past to address performance issues. Disabling these drivers might have been a temporary fix for some, but it can create compatibility issues when upgrading to newer versions of ESXi.
In conclusion, if you’re planning to upgrade your homelab to vSphere 7 and are using a SuperMicro system with the default VMware AHCI drivers disabled, make sure to re-enable them before attempting the upgrade. This will ensure seamless compatibility and avoid any potential issues.
As always, I encourage you to share your experiences and learnings in the comments below! Happy upgrading, and remember, virtualization is life!