For my vSphere cluster I have a set of HPE bl460c blades each with the FlexFabric 536flb adapter in the LOM slot which does double duty as both network adapter and FC adapter via FCoE. This has worked well since I set it up last year. However recently I've had to rebuild one of the blades from scratch. Initially I tried this with ESX 6.5, but after running into problems I reverted to the latest release of 6.0 and have found no difference between them. The problem is that the adapter is no longer recognized as a storage adapter. The network side of it functions fine but as a storage adapter it simply doesn't exist and I'm left with no access to my SAN. Running 'esxcli fcoe adapter list' returns nothing. Running 'esxcli system module list' the fcoe module is not listed.
It sounds very much like the problem described in this blog post:
http://tomaskalabis.com/wordpress/vmware-esxi-broadcom-bcm75840-and-software-fcoe/
and this Dell support article:
And I note that the HPE 536flb uses the same chipset and OEM driver as the Dell adapter, however the fix in these articles - setting the autodiscover parameter to 1 - doesn't seem to work. The other solution in the Dell article, reverting to an older driver, does succeed in getting it to show up as a storage adapter again, however it's stuck Offline. The bnx2fc module refuses to load with the error 'bad parameter'.
Has anyone else experienced this? How do I get access to my storage back? (and why hasn't this affected any of the other hosts which are all fully patched and updated to the same version I built this one with?) Thanks.