I recently had a customer running into storage performance issues, and we determined that Qlogic CNA I/O card firmware and driver upgrades were in order.

Updating the drivers on multiple hosts if you have VMware Update Manager is easy. Just simply import the VIB into the patch repository, setup or change out the drivers in an existing baseline, and remediate your hosts. You can see similar instructions on my other blog post about updating Cisco UCS drivers within vSphere environments.

But what about firmware updates?

Qlogic QConvergeConsole

Qlogic has a pre-boot package you can use to update the firmware, but that’s not automated.  Plus, it can get pretty tedious having to boot off a USB stick or image remotely through an out of band management card.

Thankfully, Qlogic has a set of utilities to help you get more information about your Qlogic cards, and deploy new adapter firmware packages right from vCenter!

How do you take advantage of this?

You need to deploy the vCenter Qlogic plug-in. There are two packages available – one for the thick client, and one for the Web Client. I would recommend the Web Client one. First off, VMware has ceased development of the thick client, so generally using web plug-ins when given a choice is better. Secondly, I quite honestly had issues even getting the vSphere client plug-in to work properly, but the web client plugin worked great. Both had installation issues. I neglected to write down the exact wording, but the installer (and this was on a Windows installable vCenter 5.5 server) said something to the effect of an invalid console mode. After some googling, I found for other software from other manufacturers this can be overcome by setting the compability mode to Windows 7/2008R2. After doing that, both installed easily.

You also need to deploy the CIM provider VIB to the ESXi hosts. This is again another simple VIB deployment to the hosts, but does require a reboot. Updated drivers and CIM provider can be done to save time.

How to update Qlogic firmware

To update the firmware on Qlogic HBAs, navigate to the host you wish to update, and go to Manage > QConvergeConsole. Be patient, as the plug-in gathers and displays the information. The plug-in isn’t exactly a speed demon. Once it displays information for the HBAs, you click on the card on the left pain of the plug-in, and then click the card you wish to update. You’ll get current information about the card, including firmware information, and various features. You can even toggle some modes on the card like Personality Type and SR-IOV.

Click “Update Adapter Flash Image”. In the next window, browse to the downloaded card firmware, select the bin image, and click OK. You’ll then be provided with a confirmation dialogue box that shows you the firmware you’re currently running, and the new firmware you’re about to install. Click OK to proceed.

Be patient as it deploys the firmware. This can take several minutes. Once completed, you’ll receive a dialogue box that says the firmware will not take effect until after you reboot.

Note also if you have multiple Qlogic cards in your server, you must update each card individually, even if they’re the same model card.

At this point, reboot your ESXi server normally, and verify firmware updated successfully after the server boots back up.

FYI, for this customer, updating the drivers and firmware increased synthetic benchmarks by about 250%.  It’s definitely worthwhile to check for these updates, especially if your environment isn’t performing up to snuff.