This article provides steps for determining the driver and firmware versions for Host Bus Adapters (HBA) and physical network interface cards (NICs) on ESXi.
To check the driver and firmware version of a Host Bus Adapter:
- Open a SSH session to the ESXi host.
- Run this command to list the Host Bus Adapters (HBAs): esxcli storage core adapter list or esxcfg-scsidevs -a
- Run this command to get get the specifics of the device driver version: vmkload_mod -s HBADriver |grep Version
- The highlighted section is the device driver version.
- You could also run this script to list the device driver versions for all the vmhbas at once: for a in $(esxcfg-scsidevs -a |awk '{print $2}') ;do vmkload_mod -s $a |grep -i version ;done
- To check the recommended driver for the card, we must obtain the Vendor ID (VID), Device ID (DID), Sub-Vendor ID (SVID), and Sub-Device ID (SDID) using the vmkchdev command: vmkchdev -l |grep vmhba1
In this example, the values are:
VID = 8086
DID = 7111
SVID = 15ad
SDID = 01976
- Alternatively, you could fetch the same information by running this command: esxcfg-info | less
- Need to search vmhbaX by entering "/vmhbaX" where X is the number: my example below /vmhba1
- To exit Press Ctrl + Z
To check the version information of the physical network interface card in vSphere ESXi:
- To list the network interface cards and names. Run esxcli network nic list
- Run this command esxcli network nic get -n vmnic0 to get the information of the network interface.
- To check the recommended driver for the card, we must obtain the Vendor ID (VID), Device ID (DID), Sub-Vendor ID (SVID), and Sub-Device ID (SDID) using the vmkchdev command: vmkchdev -l |grep vmnic0
In this example, the values are:
VID = 15ad
DID = 07b0
SVID = 15ad
SDID = 07b0
Use the VMware Compatibility Guide https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?deviceCategory=io to search the (IO devices) for the Vendor ID (VID), Device ID (DID), Sub-Vendor ID (SVID), and Sub-Device ID (SDID).
Note: Check the ESXi host version by running this command: vmware -vl
- ESXi host version and the network type, you then know the version of the driver to use
Note: It is recommended the driver be up to date
- Driver updates are available on the VMware downloads page https://customerconnect.vmware.com/downloads/#all_products, which can be accessed by clicking on the top of list driver.