Firmware catalog for Dell's vSAN Ready Nodes

What is a vSAN firmware catalog?

A firmware catalog is an aggregation of all firmware bundles that are supported on multiple generations of Dell servers. A vSAN firmware catalog is designed to support Dell’s vSAN Ready Nodes based on PowerEdge R740xd, R740, R640, R840, R750, R650, R7515, R6515, MX750c, R660, R760, R6616, R7615, R7625 and MX760c servers.
 

Server Models supported.

Server Models supported for vSAN firmware catalog.
 

Firmware catalogs for Dell’s VMware vSAN Ready Nodes

The intent of this vSAN firmware catalog is to provide supported and certified firmware versions for selected vSAN Ready Nodes. The firmware catalog, when used along with Dell’s customized VMware ESXi ISO images, provides a "wanted state" for customers. The vSAN firmware catalog has the specific firmware versions for all supported vSAN components when used with the corresponding Dell customized ESXi image. Together these two products provide a path to the wanted vSAN cluster state.

See VMware vSphere Life-Cycle Manager (vLCM) and Dell integration whitepaper section "Configuring vSphere Wanted State for Dell PowerEdge VMware cluster using vLCM" to setup a wanted state. Though the example mentions the ESXi catalog, you may replace that with the vSAN catalog to create a vSAN wanted state. When you use the firmware catalog and the corresponding Dell customized ESXi ISO image, you achieve a wanted state from the driver firmware compatibility point of view. 

Below is a table which maps the recommended firmware catalog for Dell's VMware vSAN Ready nodes along with the corresponding customized ESXi images which contain the supported and certified HBA and NVMe drivers. This is a living document and gets modified as and when new catalogs are released. The Dell customized VMware ESXi images can be downloaded from VMware download page . The driver versions that are integrated into Dell customized VMware ESXi images are documented in 8.x, 7.x and 6.x customization guides. 

See Dell support pages for 8.x, 7.x and 6.x for various documentations around Dell VMware ESXi versions. 

Starting May 2024, we've divided the payload content to multiple KBs based on the ESXi branch. This page is going to be static and the below KBs will have the firmware payloads for individual ESXi based vSAN branches moving forward.

• For the vSAN catalog payloads supporting ESXi 6.x branch, refer here . 
• For the vSAN catalog payloads supporting ESXi 7.x branch, refer here . 
• For the vSAN catalog payloads supporting ESXi 8.x branch, refer here .