Fusion-IO HP IO Accelerator Firmware Question

[pac1085]

Hey all, I'm looking to buy a few first gen Fusion-IO IOdrive 320gb (HP Branded IO Accelerator) for my home lab to be used with VMware VSAN.

Question - can you run Fusion-IO Firmware on the HP branded cards? HP only supports up to ESXi 5.5 with the drivers/firmware on their website, but Fusion-IO has drivers/firmware for ESXi 6 on theirs.

I noticed that the 3.2.8 firmware from HP is much larger than the 3.2.11 firmware from Fusion-IO.

I'm hoping these cards will take the 3.2.11 flash and I can use the latest drivers.

Thanks for any help.

 

[jfeldt]

I've only had luck using firmware from the same vendor as the card. Each of them have a list of acceptable part numbers that they will flash to and that is usually just their own set of cards.

I believe you can run with mis-matched firmware and driver versions but it will yell at you and it's likely less supported.

You can find a bit more on how to check within the firmware from a forum post of mine here:
Fusion-IO Win7

for example:
./fio-update-iodrive -l ioaccelerator_101583_6.fff

 

[pac1085]

Thank you. Someone on another forum told me I could run the official Fusion-IO firmware on the HP branded drives, so I bought a few. 2 of them ended up being DOA and the 3rd one was OK but I can confirm that it will not take the 3.2.11 unbranded firmware (from 3.2.8-HP). I ended up returning all 3.