H240 shows up during POST but not in SSACLI

[farbener]

Hello there

I'm trying to setup TrueNAS Core on my HP DL380p Gen8 in a ESXI 6.5 VM.

I bought a H240 HBA because I couldn't get a H220 used as some forums stated it works just fine.
I installed the card in slot 2, redone the internal wiring so I actually can use it. It shows up during the boot process with 3 Logical drives (have only one installed aswell)

In iLO4 I checked the system logs and it shows as 2 defective drives and 1 working. I believe the card is set in RAID mode instead of HBA so I want to change that. Doesn't show up in SSA so I wanted to check with SSACLI which doesn't find it either.

I'm not that experienced in Servers in general. My prior experience is with a old Workstation made into a small Bare Metal.

My P420i has 2 drives attached both seperate Raid 0
The H240 should right now have 1 drive attached, passthrough to ESXI for the TrueNAS

I attached some screenshots that maybe help?

Appreciate the help

 

[BLinux]

sounds like the card is working, although you'll want to verify full functionality later on.

user programs like ssacli might not work if the OS driver for the card isn't installed or not loading correctly. can you confirm the driver loaded and detected the card? I forget how to do that in FreeBSD, but I think there should be a tool called lspci on the command line that you can use to see which driver is in use for each PCIe device. alternatively, looking through the system logs might also reveal detection (or lack of) the card by the OS and loading the driver.

 

[farbener]

sounds like the card is working, although you'll want to verify full functionality later on.

user programs like ssacli might not work if the OS driver for the card isn't installed or not loading correctly. can you confirm the driver loaded and detected the card? I forget how to do that in FreeBSD, but I think there should be a tool called lspci on the command line that you can use to see which driver is in use for each PCIe device. alternatively, looking through the system logs might also reveal detection (or lack of) the card by the OS and loading the driver.

According to the bootup sequence the H240 is running on Firmware 6.88 so I wanted to update the firmware to 7.0. I went on and downloaded the components, moved them to the tmp folder in esxi and tried installing. It states "Update not attempted, Same or newer version already installed".

I went on to check the firmware version using ESXCLI and noticed the card not showing up at all in there. In ESXI, PCI device tab, the card shows up and I already set it up passthrough mode as required for TrueNAS.


Correct me if im wrong but I believe that, since I used the custom HP ESXI ISO for my server, it may already have some firmware needed for the H240 installed.

 

[BLinux]

@farbener from my recollection, ESXi is very particular about driver support and also deprecate drivers when they choose to no longer support it. So, I think it's very important to check driver support for the particular version you are using. it maybe the case that the software you are using just doesn't support that card.

try installing or live booting a more driver friendly OS and see if it sees the card as a PCIe device in the OS. and maybe you can run your firmware update there.