Hello virtual ones. I have recently set up a Dell PowerEdge 6450/700 machine. It's a bit ol I know, but hey, I'm poor.
It supports only SCSI drives and I have it running VMWare ESX Server 3i, 3.5.0, 110180 (recent patch because of the
much publicised timebomb problem). Could I add the following expansion card: http://www.lightcomputers.com/product.asp?code=168298
to allow me to add a 320 GB ATA drive from another machine? Is it likely to work?
Welcome to the forums - and I am sorry to say your first answer will not be what you want to hear - No - ESX does not support IDE -
This isn't entirely accurate. ESX and ESXi are not Supported on any IDE chipsets. This means if you manage to get an IDE chipset to work and have a problem with the software, VMware won't talk to you, or all they'll say is that you need to run it on a supported platform.
ESX and ESXi will not install to and/or run from an IDE chipset. It seems that this has to do with how they've built their boot code, especially for ESXi, but the drives need to be identified by the kernel as SCSI drives in order for the boot to work, otherwise it will just go off and try to find a SCSI drive.
All that said, I was able to configure a whitebox machine booting ESXi from a USB stick to use an IDE drive for a datastore. ESXi does have a generic IDE module - they mainly use it to support IDE-based CD/DVD-ROM adapters. This IDE module will pick up IDE hard drives and present them in ESX(i) when you get it booted. Still, no joy in terms of installing to IDE devices - the installer is looking specifically for SCSI drives.
Finally, the last hope would be if you somehow found an IDE-based RAID card that had a chipset that is supported by ESXi. I don't know for sure that this would work, but there's a slim chance that ESX(i) may see this as a SCSI drive instead of an IDE drive and be able to install to and boot from it. That all hinges upon the drivers in ESXi actually seeing the RAID card correctly, and, by and large, the chipsets supported by ESX are SATA/SAS/SCSI-only chipsets and you'll have a very difficult time finding an IDE RAID card with a chipset listed in the HCL.
Hi Nick,
That sounds very promising. Mainly because I don't need / want to boot from it particularly, I just need it to be accessible. I'm using it via NFS at the moment. I boot off a native, local SCSI disk (two LUNs as one datastore) and present the majority of the VMs an NFS datastore. Very useful, but I mainly want to turn the NFS server off .
It's not that expensive so I think I'll risk it and update this thread with the results.
Thanks for your help.
Depending on the chipset of that card it may or may not work. I took a look at the link you posted and you're right, it's a cheap enough card that it probably isn't a huge risk in getting it and trying it out. I have no idea which chipsets the generic IDE module supports. My whitebox was an Intel-based motherboard with Intel chipsets everywhere...
Here's what ESXi will see - http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/Hardware_support.php. Some of the items are of course supported, some aren't but work fine. A few don't work.
I got one of these in the end by chance, which our technical manager was throwing away - PDC20269 (Ultra133 TX2). It's on the HCL and works fine. A lot better than using NFS over a 100Mbps card!