A couple of days ago I was visiting a customer to setup their Lenovo host to run vSAN – after the initial setup of vSAN kernel IPs, disk groups and so on, I took a look at the “VSAN Health check” to make sure that everything was healthy and supported.

Under the “hardware compatibility” part all checkmarks where green, but the Controller firmware version was not detected – so I did found it a bit strange that it reports the disk controller as supported without knowing what version it actually was running.

This issue is not new to me, as I have seen it a couple of times before, but this time it was different after all.

Normally when I setup Lenovo servers for vSAN I need to install the StorCLI to be able to see the firmware version of the disk controller – that is normal for LSI based disk controller and is documented by my colleague Allan Kjær in this blog article!

The difference here was that the disk controller in this server was a Lenono N2215 HBA (N2200 series) and this time it wasn’t the StorCLI that was needed, but instead the SAS3FLASH utility.

But I was not able to find this utility from the Lenovo website, but the “Ask VMware” button in vSAN heath gave me a hint that I could be found at the “Broadcom Support page”

But again I couldn’t find the download under the HBA chipset model that was in the server, so I just selected a different controller and actually found the SAS3FLASH utility: Link to download

The SAS3FLASH.zip file was extracted and the NDS version vib file was uploaded to a VMware datastore (vmware-esx-sas3ircu.vib).

After the installation of the utility from ESXi SSH shell, “vSAN Health Check” was able to report the installed firmware version. Hurray!

My guess is that the StorCLI utility is for RAID based controllers (that runs in HBA / Pass-through mode) and SAS3FLASH might be for the HBA (non RAID) controllers – just my guess!