I got a question from my buddy Paudie O'Riordan this morning where he was noticing a strange issue while trying to upgrade his ESXi hosts from 6.0 to 6.5 (all on the VMware HCL). Like many of our customers, he runs ESXi on USB device and when he attempted to upgrade using ESXi Scripted Install (Go Automation!), he was surprised to find that his USB device was not being detected.



Interestingly, I had literally just finished answering a similar question on our internal Socialcast forum and I had wondered if Paudie was also seeing the same problem. The issue looks to be related to the new USB Native Driver (vmkusb) that was introduced in ESXi 6.5 where is it is unable to claim the specific USB device.

Although you can disable the USB Native Driver and fall back to the legacy driver as mentioned in this VMware KB 2147650, but because this is happening during the installation/upgrade process, it can get a bit tricky.

Luckily, we have a workaround. We just need to disable the Native Drivers for the initial installation which will allow us to perform the upgrade and then we can disable the vmkusb driver and re-enable the rest of the Native Drivers post-install. The last step is needed especially if you rely on some of the other Native Drivers, which was the case for Paudie as his vSAN setup was using them. Below are the instructions on the workaround.

Step 1 - Append preferVmklinux=TRUE to the ESXi's boot.cfg file whether that is on a USB device which has your ESXi installer or on your PXE Server for ESXi Scripted Installations.

Here is an example of what boot.cfg should look like:

kernelopt=runweasel preferVmklinux=TRUE

Step 2 - Boot up ESXi and you should now be able to see the USB device and continue with your upgrade.

Step 3 - Once ESXi has been successfully upgraded, go ahead and run the following commands to re-enable the Native Drivers and disable the vmkusb driver (reboot required for changes to go into effect):

esxcli system settings kernel set -s preferVmklinux -v FALSE

esxcli system module set --enabled false -m vmkusb

reboot

Note: If you are doing an ESXi Scripted Installation, you can actually append just the first two commands (replace esxcli with localcli as hostd is not running) as part of the Kickstart %post section. This would then allow you to automate the entire upgrade using this fix without having to perform any manual steps or additional reboots.