Warning about LSI/Avago/Broadcom controllers (and other hardware) in ESXi

[DracoDan]

I have to be careful about what I say here, but if you read between the lines here I think you will understand what I'm getting at: VMware plans to deprecate vmkLinux APIs and associated driver ecosystem - VMware vSphere Blog

So anything without a native vSphere driver ***MAY*** not working in future versions of ESXi. From my research so far I have found that there are no native vSphere drivers for LSI SAS controllers older than the 3xxx series, so they will be affected by this unless Broadcom decides to develop a driver for older hardware.

More information: What is the Impact of the VMKlinux Driver Stack Deprecation? - VMware vSphere Blog

 

[Stephan]

IMHO natural progression of things with VMware. Old CPUs are also peu a peu obsoleted. The industry appears to want to move to a 5 year hardware replacement cycle globally. Not all our customers agree. If you really have to run stuff on older gear, there are other virtualization solutions still. Xen, KVM, ... or even containers like Docker or systemd-nspawn (what a name - works good though).

 

[DracoDan]

Absolutely, but some of us run products on our home lab as a replication of what we support in our jobs. For those of us in that situation this will mean we will have a large expense coming up, and for anyone working on building/upgrading their lab right now this is a very important thing to factor.

In the past the supported hardware deprecations were gradual, but this is going to be a big jump in the hardware requirements. I'm really hoping there's a way to run in compatibility mode to allow the Linux driver shim, but at this point I have not seen anything to suggest that's going to happen.