Dell FX2 Blade Software iSCSI Adapters not persistent on reboot

 

I recently had an issue with some Dell FX2 Blade Software iSCSI Adapters that were not persistent on a reboot.  This meant, every time the host was rebooted we had to go in and manually recreate the iSCSI adapter so the hosts could see storage.  Obviously, that is not a solution.  The blades are running the latest version of ESXi 6.0 and all drivers on the blades are up to date as well, with no affect on the behavior.  After a bit of research I discovered parameters for the bnx2fc adapters.  One named bnx2fc_autodiscovery, which is the parameter to control auto FCoE discovery during system boot is what I was after.  By default this is set to disabled which is why the adapters are not showing up after the host is rebooted.

FX2 Blade Chassis

Solution:

The command to see these parameters is:

esxcli system module parameters list -m bnx2fc

This will show you what they are currently set to, and next to bnx2fc_autodiscovery you will see it is blank, meaning it’s disabled.  In order to enable it, you run the following:

esxcli system module parameters set module bnx2fc parameterstring bnx2fc_autodiscovery=1
Software iSCSI Adapter Autodiscovery
You will see now that it is set to 1, meaning that autodiscovery is enabled and your software iSCSI adapters will be found automatically after a reboot.  Reboot the host and verify your adapter comes back up as expected.  This issue has not been documented in any Dell or VMware KBs to my knowledge.
I hope this helps anyone else having an issue.