After a fresh installation of ESXi 5.1 on a Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) CB500 blade, I faced the following error while trying to connect to ESXi using the vSphere Client:
Call "ServiceInstance.RetrieveContent" for object "ServiceInstance" on Server <hostname> failed
It was not possible to connect to ESXi through the vSphere Client or SSH, although the host was pingable. The following VMware Community article pointed me in a direction about a possible issue with the used Emulex CNA adapter/mezzanine. ESXi was installed using the HDS OEM ESXi 5.1 iso, as recommended by HDS. Continue reading for a solution for this problem.Because no network connection was available, I used the console to investigate which Emulex NIC driver was used for this installation:
esxcli software vib list
and
ethtool -i vmnic0
It turned out driver version 4.1.334.0 is part of the HDS OEM cd. After an additional search I ran into VMware KB Article 2030818 which provides links for driver support for I/O cards. For the combination HDS/Emulex, Emulex recommends to use driver 4.1.334.48 as displayed in the table below:
This is not the driver included in the HDS OEM ISO for ESXi 5.1. Fortunately this specific driver version is available for download in the VMware portal:
The challenge is how to get this driver on your ESXi server because no network connection is available at this moment.
I choose to create an ISO file, include the driver, connect the ISO to ESXi through the virtual media option and then mount the ISO to ESXi:
# vmkload_mod iso9660 Module iso9660 loaded successfully # /sbin/vsish -e set /vmkModules/iso9660/mount mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0 # cd /vmfs/volumes/CDROMLABELNAME
After mounting the ISO, you can install the driver:
# esxcli software vib install -d /fullpathtoviborzip/drivername.zip
(drivername.zip will be be2net-4.1.334.48-offline_bundle-732042.zip in this particular case)
The old driver will now be replaced by the new driver:
After a reboot the new network driver is loaded and you can connect to the ESXi server through the vSphere Client!
Recommendation to HDS: please update the OEM driver CD with the correct versions 🙂