Downgrading nhpsa driver for vSAN

On upgrading a cluster running on HPE Blades to vSphere 7, I had a vSAN Hardware Compatibility Warning that the Controller Driver was not VMware Certified. I had been very careful with the HCL before upgrading and I was certain that all hardware components were compatible.

Turns out that I had simply gone too far and I needed to downgrade the installed  ‘nhpsa (70.0051.0.100-2vmw.701.0.25.17325551)’ to ‘70.0050.0.100-1vmw.701’ – but that’s not much information to work on. I started by Googling ‘70.0050.0.100-1vmw.701’ and came across the excellent site: https://esxi-patches.v-front.de/ where I was able to find a direct link to the *.vib I needed: https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/esx/vmw/vib20/nhpsa/VMW_bootbank_nhpsa_70.0050.0.100-1vmw.701.0.0.16850804.vib

Please note, the link is for an actual *.vib and not a VIB bundle which is actually a *.zip. The is in the install method where *.vib uses ‘esxcli software vib install -v <VIBNAME.vib>’ while the more common VIB.zip uses ‘esxcli software vib install -d <VIB.zip>’. Since this was a *.vib, here are the commands:

esxcli software vib remove -n nhpsa
esxcli software vib install -v https://hostupdate.vmware.com/software/VUM/PRODUCTION/main/esx/vmw/vib20/nhpsa/VMW_bootbank_nhpsa_70.0050.0.100-1vmw.701.0.0.16850804.vib
esxcli system shutdown reboot -r 'replace driver'