Recommended procedure for flashing 3x9211-8i on ESXi 6.0 passthrough

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yu130960

Member
Sep 4, 2013
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I have 3 x M1015 IBM cards which were crossflashed to 9211-8i (IT) P17 with bios.

I am not exactly sure I need to upgrade, but thought it may be time to do it as I haven't flashed the cards since 2014 and am not sure whether the latest OMNIOS driver is relying on a certain level of firmware.

The box (as set out in my sig) is an AIO ESXi with a Napp-it storage server vm.

The cards are all passthrough to the VM, which I would image complicates flashing them in ESXi.

Is the safest way to flash these guys to shutdown the ESXi box and boot the server to DOS and flash them all individually or has anyone used the following attempt to flash all at once switch?

sas2flsh.exe -o -fwall 2118it.bin

^^The above is not going to flash the bios which I never needed in the first place as they are all in IT mode passed through to the VM

Any recommendations would be appreciated.
 

whitey

Moderator
Jun 30, 2014
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I believe there is a way (and documented but you may have to dig, google 'flash LSI HBA from ESXi' and there are a ton of good rscs) to flash new FW from w/in ESXi. I typically flash in an old BIOS based Dell workstation I have laying arnd for such purposes and typically only flash one at a time but you can roll the dice. Don't think there is anything too scary w/ that cmd. :-D

At 9211-8i's I typically throw 'sas2flsh.exe -o -f 2118it.bin' and done w/ it...throw in that other switch and you may be onto something.
 

yu130960

Member
Sep 4, 2013
127
10
18
Canada
Just to close the loop on this, I successfully flashed all the cards by shutting down the host and booting to a DOS disk (I actually took the controllers out of passthrough in case something went nuts like the ID changing but don't think it was necessary).

In order to wipe the bios from a couple of the cards I issued the following clean flash command:

sas2flash.exe -0 -e 6

and then without rebooting

sas2flsh.exe -o -f 2118t.bin