With the arrival of a few more physical hosts for my VMware clusters I’ve been on a quest to automate the patching and maintenance of my servers’ firmware. I noticed a few days ago that QLogic has a version of their standalone SANsurfer HBA tool, scli, for VMware ESX 3.5. This is nice because it means I can script both firmware updates and HBA parameter settings, guaranteeing that they are identical among all my hosts and making it easy to update when necessary.
For example, my storage vendor recommends certain parameters for my QLE2462 HBAs, which I can script as:
/opt/QLogic_Corporation/SANsurferCLI/scli -n 0 FR 2048 RD 5 HL 0 HD 125 CO 1 EF 0 ET 256 ML 256 FL 1 TR 1 LR 30 PD 15 LT 15 OM 0 ID 0
As with most things an “scli -h” will get you verbose help, including everything you need to update the firmware and a complete list of parameters you can set.