Determine ESXi Installation Media
I was welcomed to my Monday morning with an interesting Solarwinds alert for one of my ESXi hosts: Direct, Local USB Direct-Access (mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0) has a current status of Critical. Awesome! I love it when USB devices fail.
But wait, something didn’t add up correctly. It was my understanding that none of my hosts are USB install. Our standard is either local SSD, SD cards or in the case of Nutanix, SATADOM’s. So why am I getting a USB failure for my host? Let’s take a look.
Under Storage Adapters, sure enough there’s a vmhba32 under “USB Storage Controller” with a Path status of “Dead”. Again, these aren’t USB installs… or are they?
The first thing we need to determine is the path of our boot disk. We can accomplish this with:
ls -la /bootbank
That should output something similar to:
/bootbank -> /vmfs/volumes/d73c2987-b916392d-098d-ab39b98d0fd1
With the path of our boot disk, we can now find the disk ID:
vmkfstools -P /vmfs/volumes/d73c2987-b916392d-098d-ab39b98d0fd1
Which will output something like:
vfat-0.04 file system spanning 1 partitions.
File system label (if any):
Mode: private
Capacity 261853184 (63929 file blocks * 4096), 93765632 (22892 blocks) avail
UUID: d73c2987-b916392d-098d-ab39b98d0fd1
Partitions spanned (on "disks"):
mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0:6
Is Native Snapshot Capable: NO
And now we can get some much needed details using the disk ID and esxcli:
esxcli storage core device list |grep -A27 ^mpx
Display Name: Local USB Direct-Access (mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0)
Has Settable Display Name: true
Size: 15280
Device Type: Direct-Access
Multipath Plugin: NMP
Devfs Path: /vmfs/devices/disks/mpx.vmhba32:C0:T0:L0
Vendor: Dell Com
Model: Internal Dual SD
Revision: 0110
SCSI Level: 2
Is Pseudo: false
Status: on
Is RDM Capable: false
Is Local: true
Is Removable: true
Is SSD: false
Is Offline: false
Is Perennially Reserved: false
Queue Full Sample Size: 0
Queue Full Threshold: 0
Thin Provisioning Status: unknown
Attached Filters:
VAAI Status: unsupported
Is Local SAS Device: false
Is Boot USB Device: false
So there you have it. The host is leveraging dual internal SD cards! Thank you vCenter for trying to confuse me.