Infiniband in ESXi adapter troubles

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AdamW

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Dec 11, 2015
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I'm hoping someone with more experience can help me out here. I am attempting to set up IPoIB with ESXi to run VSAN.. on the cheap.

I have 3 servers (Lenovo TS140) a DDR IB switch (silverstorm 9024) a heap of CX4-CX4 IB cables and a bunch of HCAs

I have been having some headaches with the HCA's in ESXi

I have a growing stack of HCAs I have tried and failed to get working.

So far I have found a Qlogic 7204 card which is actually a mellanox MHGH28-XTC which appears to work but when I ordered some more MHGH28-XTC cards these fail to appear in the esxi console at all. The working one is a Rev A3 card and the other 2 are Rev A4.

I am also having issues getting the firmware tools to work in esxi to even check the cards.

Getting pretty frustrated with it and out of my depth with the IB kit, ended up with some Infinihost cards instead of ConnectX cards at one point as I wasn't really sure what to buy, last thing I want to do is blow more cash on HCAs.

So if anyone has any experience with the MHGH28-XTC cards (dual port DDR IB HCAs) and IB in esxi id appreciate some tips! I cant even get MST to start at the moment to run flint to check the firmware versions.