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SLES 10 - Upgrading to the LSI Logic SCSI Adapter

It turns out that in my environment, a number of VMs were 'recycled', meaning that the group that runs them took an old SUSE 32 bit system, and then wiped the disk and then installed SLES 10 x64. An interesting artifact about that setup is that those VMs are now using the older BusLogic virtual SCSI adapter and vmxnet driver instead of the LSI Logic adapter and E1000 driver that would be provisioned to a VM were it created new today. This problem reared it's head when I was upgrading a cluster from ESXi 3.5.0 Update 4 to ESXi 4.0, it turns out that ESXi 4.0 no longer supports the BusLogic SCSI adapter with an OS Type of SLES 10 x64. The VM would migrate to the new host ( with 2 warnings, one about the SCSI adapter and one about the network adapter ), but the VMotion would ultimately fail the VM back onto the old host.

By no means am I unfamiliar with linux, but most of my experience has been with RedHat based distros, when I cracked open modprobe.conf on the SLES box the drivers all referenced /bin/true, and it took me nearly an hour to get the VM switched over to the newer LSI Logic controller so I could finish upgrading the cluster. Below is a snippet on how to migrate from the BusLogic adapter to the LSI Logic adapter in SLES 10.



First, boot the VM with the old BusLogic Controller

Then, load the lsilogic modules

bash:# modprobe mptbase
bash:# modprobe mptscsih
bash:# modprobe mptspi

Next, edit /etc/sysconfig/kernel, and change the line "INITRD_MODULES=" from

INITRD_MODULES="Buslogic "

to

INITRD_MODULES="Buslogic mptbase mptscsih mptspi "

Finally, generate a new initrd

bash:# mkinitrd

Then shut down the VM, and change the scsi adapter type from Buslogic to LSI Logic and power the VM back on.

Labels: SLES 10 vSphere ESXi 4.0 upgrade

Posted by Dominic Rivera at Wednesday, June 17, 2009.