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duz
Contributor
Contributor

promise fastTrack S150 Tx4

I don't understand why esxi (and esx) doesn't recognize raid 1 (and raid 0) volume create with fastTrack raid controller (ctrl+f).

Esxi Installer ask me where i want to install itself, on sata disk 1 or on sata disk 2. I tried to install on disk 1, thinking that raid works..but it doesn't work.

Any ideas? Any procedure.

Promise FastTrack S150 Tx4 is on simple.map...

thk

Alessandro

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weinstein5
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Immortal

The issue is the fasttrack s150 is not a supported controller - see . You might check out - it is a website with information on getting non-supported to work -

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iLikeMoney
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I don't know about the Tx4 but I have successfully installed ESXi on four Dell Precision 450's equipped with the FastTrak s150 Tx2 card which should be very close. These machines had 2 physical HD's configured as RAID0 from the factory. You should be able to install in RAID0 mode at least initially -- However following the installation and first reboot you will receive a disk error message or some such. At this point reboot and go into your RAID setup, reconfigure both drives as RAID1, save and exit... the reboot into ESXi should be without error and when you access the ESXi server from your infrastructure client you will see and be able to use both datastores. The Tx4 may be different enough that this process doesn't work so no guarantees here. If Tx4 doesn't work I've seen the Tx2 still around at a cheap price, it's kind of scarce now because it's older but it's out there. In my case anyway, even though we can't run it as RAID0 the performance of the hosted VMs on this rather dated workstation (dual CPU with 2GB RAM) is great, I would say near native performance with XP/2003 guests. -Good luck.

To clarify, when I say "reconfigure both drives as RAID1", a traditional two-drive RAID1 array is not what I mean to convey, in this case you want to configure all drives as RAID1 individually this means the end result is all drives are essentially non-raided.

Message was edited by: iLikeMoney

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duz
Contributor
Contributor

Here you can find my controller.

I can access only the individual drive (both luckly).....

I tried to install esxi both with raid0 and raid1... but esxi see 2 disk always...!?

thk

Alessandro

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iLikeMoney
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Yes, I don't think you can get actual RAID functionality with this card under ESXi. If it's anything like the Tx2 then you should be able to install and run ESXi, you just won't have RAID functionality. I was personally satisfied that I could even get ESXi working on these boxes at all since it's not exactly server hardware, these are high-end workstations but they're OLD. Note: Even when I had the machine configured in RAID0 it wasn't being seen as a single drive during the installation of ESXi -- I just chose the first drive and that was good enough to get it installed.

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szyche
Contributor
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Hello!

I have installed ESXi on a IDE drive and now I try to get my FastTrak S150 SX4 Controler to work. It is a PCI-Card that has 256 MB DIMM RAM and 4 Drives attched to it.

During boot it says "FastTrak S150 SX4 BIOS 2.0.70.24"

First I have followed the steps on http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/customize_oem_tgz.php:

The output of "lspci -v" is as follows:

...

03:11.00 RAID bus controller Mass storage controller: Promise Technology, Inc.

Class 0104: 105a:6622

...

This is my "pci.ids":

...

6269 PDC20271 (FastTrak TX2000)

105a 6269 FastTrak TX2/TX2000

6622 20622 (FastTrak S150 TX4) 105a 6622 FastTrak S150 TX4

6621 PDC20621 SX4000 4 Channel IDE RAID Controller

6629 PDC20619 (FastTrak TX4000)

...

and this is my "simple.map"

...

105a:6269 0000:0000 storage ide

105a:6622 0000:0000 storage sata_promise

105a:6629 0000:0000 storage sata_promise

...

When I check "/var/log/messages" after the ESXi has booted I get the following:

...

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.226 cpu0:2699)Loading module sata_promise ...

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.226 cpu0:2699)Mod: 936: Starting load for module: sata_promise R/O length: 0xb000 R/W length: 0x4000 Md5sum: b39926f143fba2aced9f1f4ddd8455fa

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)Mod: 1373: Module sata_promise: initFunc: 0x9e3124 text: 0x9e2000 data: 0x2963220 bss: 0x29635e0 (writeable align 32)

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)Mod: 1389: modLoaderHeap avail before: 7797096

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)Initial heap size : 1048576,max heap size: 8388608

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)<7>libata version 1.20 loaded.

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)PCI: driver sata_promise is looking for devices

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)PCI: Trying 00:02.0

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)PCI: Announcing 00:02.0

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)PCI: Trying 00:1d.0

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)PCI: Trying 00:1d.1

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)PCI: Trying 00:1d.2

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)PCI: Trying 00:1d.3

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)PCI: Trying 00:1d.7

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)PCI: Trying 00:1f.1

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)PCI: Trying 00:1f.3

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)PCI: Announcing 00:1f.3

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)PCI: Trying 00:1f.5

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)PCI: Announcing 00:1f.5

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)PCI: Trying 02:01.0

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)PCI: Trying 03:05.0

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)PCI: Announcing 03:05.0

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)PCI: Trying 03:0b.0

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)PCI: Announcing 03:0b.0

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)PCI: driver sata_promise claimed 0 device

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)ALERT: Mod: 1413: Initialization for sata_promise failed with -19.

Dec 10 20:51:27 vmkernel: 0:00:03:31.382 cpu0:2699)sata_promise failed to load with status 0, -19, 0xbad0001.

...

It seems that the drivers loads and then tries to find a card but it finds none even though there is one...

Does anybody has any idea?!?!

Any help is greatly appreciated!

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