Heads Up! Fibre Channel & vSphere 5.1 Web Client Users

A quick kudos to my colleague William Lam (@lamw) for bringing this to my attention.

There is an issue in the new vSphere 5.1 web client when it comes to displaying Fibre Channel World Wide Node Names (WWNN) and World Wide Port Names (WWPN). The WWNN & WWPN are unique identifiers used in the Fibre Channel world. The problem is that the WWPN & WWNN are not rendered correctly in the UI. It is easier to show you an example. Here is a screen shot taken from my own 5.1 environment. Note the WWNN & WWPN – the identifier displayed in the UI is in the format WWNN:WWPN.

Note that the identifiers for both adapters end in 00:00:00. Now lets use the esxcli to look at the same identifiers:

~ # esxcli storage san fc list
Adapter: vmhba1
Port ID: 010023
Node Name: 20:00:00:25:b5:00:00:17
Port Name: 20:01:00:25:b5:00:00:27
Speed: 10 Gbps
Port Type: NPort
Port State: ONLINE

Adapter: vmhba2
Port ID: 010024
Node Name: 20:00:00:25:b5:00:00:17
Port Name: 20:01:00:25:b5:00:00:37
Speed: 10 Gbps
Port Type: NPort
Port State: ONLINE

Now the issue is clearly visible. The UI is not displaying the WWPN/WWNN correctly. If you were using the web client for gathering information to do your fibre channel zoning, you won’t be successful. Until we get a resolution for this issue, please use the command line (esxcli commands) in vSphere 5.1 to obtain correct adapter WWNN/WWPN information.

If you are using the vSphere 5.1 web client to manage ESXi 5.0 hosts, the esxcli command to display adapter information is esxcli storage core adapter list.

We will also have a KB article released very soon.

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