Since baselines are deprecated in vSphere version 8 and baselines are restricted to only VMware-provided content after ESXi 7.0.3 Update P I helped one of my customers to move over to image based updating via vLCM. This has not gone by without any issues as mentioned in my previous post.
This time I was updating a 7.0.3 installation of ESXi to Update Q and got stuck on a driver issue that I had not seen before:
“Downgrades of manually added component Mellanox Native OFED ConnectX-3 Drivers (3.19.70.1) in the desired ESXi version are not supported”.
From a quick Google search I realized I was not the only one who had issues with this driver and figured out I had to downgrade it.
Firstly, I checked if the Mellanox card was in use by checking both the hardware in iDRAC (since this is a Dell server) and I also looked through the hardware tab in ESXi.
Luckily, the card was not in use and I manually removed it and updated the host using images after.
In case anyone else has this problem, this is the way to solve it:
- Place the host in Maintenance Mode
- Log onto your host using root credentials over SSH.
- Run this command:
“esxcli software vib remove -n nmlx5-core -n nmlx5-rdma -n nmlx4-core -n nmlx4-en -n nmlx4-rdma”
The expected output is:
The update completed successfully, but the system needs to be rebooted for the changes to be effective.
Reboot Required: true
VIBs Installed:
VIBs Removed: MEL_bootbank_nmlx4-core_3.19.70.1-1OEM.670.0.0.8169922, MEL_bootbank_nmlx4-en_3.19.70.1-1OEM.670.0.0.8169922, MEL_bootbank_nmlx4-rdma_3.19.70.1-1OEM.670.0.0.8169922, MEL_bootbank_nmlx5-core_4.19.70.1-1OEM.700.1.0.15525992, MEL_bootbank_nmlx5-rdma_4.19.70.1-1OEM.700.1.0.15525992
VIBs Skipped:
- Your next and final step is to reboot the host. Either from the SSH command line using the command “reboot” or from the GUI.
- Proceed updating your host with your image via vLCM.
Hope this can help anyone out there who get stuck on the same thing!
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