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bytemind
Contributor
Contributor

ESXi on Poweredge 860?

Hi,

I have a Dell PowerEdge 860 with perc SAS raid controller.

Does anyone have a ESXi running on similar hardware?

Thanks, Ebbe, Denmark

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17 Replies
Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

Hello Ebbe, welcome to the VMware Community forums. The PE 830 and 840 have been tested - http://www.vm-help.com/Whitebox_HCL.php - you should be OK with the 860. What model of perc controller does it have?

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Thomas_Prophett
Contributor
Contributor

HI Bytemind,

Welcome to the forums!

I'm currently using VMWare's ESXi 3.5 Update2 on two Dell 860's successfully. I'm using the Dell SAS 5/iR controller.

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bytemind
Contributor
Contributor

Thank your for your warm welcome - Especially from a guru Smiley Wink

It has the SAS 5/iR Adapter

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bytemind
Contributor
Contributor

Thank you for your welcome Smiley Wink

Well, thats all i wanted to hear!

Thank you!

Ebbe

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

Thanks for updating the discussion. Have fun with your install.

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__Tango
Contributor
Contributor

Just as an FYI: i have NOT been able to get ESX3i to install on a PowerEdge 860 without a raid card (meaning using onboad SATA drives). My machine has 2x160GB SATA drives hooked up directly to the onboard ports. ESX 3i v3.5.0 U3, will not install on this device, it says:

Unable to find a supported device to write the VMware ESX 3i 3.5.0 image to.

Good Luck.

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s1xth
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

You wont have any issue installing on the PE860. I have one running with no problems, but I am using the SAS on board raid controller. Not sure if you can even use those Sata ports that are on board, I never tried them. (and I have a lot of 860's!).

http://www.virtualizationimpact.com http://www.handsonvirtualization.com Twitter: @jfranconi
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__Tango
Contributor
Contributor

That was my point. Installs using the PERC or SAS card seem to work. Without a PERC or SAS card (using onboard sata) doesn't work. The onboard SATA works fine in other OSes, just not in ESXi.

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

What model of SATA controller does your 860 have?

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agomezp
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

PowerEdge 860 - ESXi Installable Update 3 or from 120505 to 130755 cause "Fail to find HD Boot partition", the explanation in

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tunasalad
Contributor
Contributor

We were having the same problem as you initially mentioned. Our Poweredge 860 has two SATA drives but no PERC or SAS raid controller cards installed.

Trying to install ESX3.5i in that scenario always failed, no matter what settings we changed in the BIOS or even after upgrading it to revision A05.

We finally found a workaround to install ESXi3.5 in this scenario:

Basically you fool the ESX3.5i installer to make it think is being installed to an IDE drive.

This worked at the first shot for us but we are not sure whether there will be any performace implications using this method or not. Any idea?

Thanks!

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

If it's the ICH7 controller that you have then you could modify oem.tgz to load the ata_piix driver instead of the ide driver - see the customizing oem.tgz article on vm-help.com. If you are concerned with performance then the best bet would be a good RAID controller with battery backed write cache.

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GoodMorningDave
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I have loaded ESX just fine,same hardware as listed here. I two drives in but see the attached.

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GoodMorningDave
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

FINALLY.

I found by installing an LSI 8344ELP I got a sata raid and ESX went in no problem in our 860.

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jmperez
Contributor
Contributor

Hi everyone!

We are going to acquire an PowerEdge 860 with the perc SAS controller, but we're going to install in the SAS controller two SATA HDD's of 2TB configured as Raid 01.

We would like to confirm if that configuration should work, because we talked to DELL and the told us that the card supports the SATA HDD's and the array, but that we cannot install the ESXi. But as i see in the post en theory it should work.

We would install version 4

Thanks in advance!

JM

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DSTAVERT
Immortal
Immortal

You should make your own new post and fully explain your issue including the version of the sas controller and what Dell said.

-- David -- VMware Communities Moderator
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Lapsap201110141
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Thomas_Prophett wrote:

I'm currently using VMWare's ESXi 3.5 Update2 on two Dell 860's successfully. I'm using the Dell SAS 5/iR controller.

Hi Thomas,

Sorry for jumping into this old thread because my other posts has been through silence so I have to revive an old one Smiley Happy

Have you tried to upgrade your ESXi 3.5 to 4.1?  Or re-install 4.1 from scratch?

I have never used ESXi before version 4.1 so excuse my stupid question below:

For 4.1, there is a "generic" official installation ISO image provided by VMware.  But there's also a "customized" official installation ISO image provided by Dell.  Is it the same in 3.5 and which one did you use?  Did you have to do special thing to make your SAS 5/iR controller to work?

Thanks in advance.

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