Update Avago LSI SMIS Provider VMware ESXi

If you are running an Avago/LSI RAID controller card in a VMware host, Avago has an SMIS provider that can be installed on the host that allows you to connect a remote Storage Manager utility to the server and interact remotely with the RAID controller and even perform or initiate RAID controller operations. This is also extremely handy if you need to check the status of a drive rebuild or silence the error “beep” during a drive rebuild.  The powerful part of using the remote utility is that all of this can be done while the system is booted into VMware ESXi.  If you have already installed the SMIS provider, how do we update? Let’s look at how to Update Avago LSI SMIS Provider VMware ESXi.

Update Avago LSI SMIS Provider VMware ESXi

Before we begin, LSI was bought by Avago Tech which is owned by Broadcom (are you keeping it straight?) so we will use the terms interchangeably.  However, the SMIS provider and drivers still have the LSI branding aside from the “Avago” Storage Manager.  The first thing for posterity sake that I wanted to do was see which version of the SMIS provider I had installed already.  To do that we can use the esxcli command:

esxcli software vib list

When we run the command we should see the lsiprovider listed.  As you can see below, the version I currently had installed was version 500.04.V0.56-0005.

The next step is to get the downloaded LSI provider over to our ESXi host.  We first need to go to Broadcom Downloads and download the latest SMIS provider.  Also, once you have downloaded the provider, extract the contents of the zip file and we are interested in the .vib file contained therein.

Take this .vib file and copy it over to your ESXi host.  Prior to doing that you will need to enable SSH connectivity to the host through the firewall configuration.  You can copy the file basically anywhere, but I generally like to upload it to the /tmp directory.  This directory gets purged on reboot so it is a good place to stick files that we don’t really care or want to be persistent.

Once we have the file uploaded to our ESXi server, we again use the esxcli command to perform the update using the command:

esxcli software vib update -v <path to update file>

As you see below, you should see the update completed successfully after a few moments.  Also, the updater shows the version that is removed and also the version that was installed.  This is a good sanity check to make sure it thinks the files have been updated.

Post Update

After the SMIS provider software has been updated, the final step that we need to do is reboot the host.  To do that:

• Place the host in maintenance mode
• Reboot – either by right-clicking the host in vCenter, issuing the reboot command from an SSH session, or by logging into the console and using the F12 command.

After the host reboots, we should be able to use the Avago Storage Manager utility to connect up to our ESXi server on which we updated the SMIS provider.

Thoughts

If you use the Avago/LSI RAID controllers in any VMware ESXi servers, having the SMIS provider installed is a must have if you ask me.  As mentioned it allows for remotely monitoring the Avago/LSI disk system, controller, etc, as well as allows us to perform and initiate many operations while the server is up and running in VMware ESXi.  This is certainly handy as you can perform many operations using this approach that could only be done otherwise booted into the RAID webui or BIOS screens which would require a maintenance period.  The process to Update Avago LSI SMIS Provider VMware ESXi is very simple and allows you to stay on top of the latest and greatest bug and stability fixes coming from Avago/LSI.