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admin5
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VMWare install on a Tyan 2882 mother board.

I am somewhat new to the VM world, Although I have it installed on 3 Dell servers at work. I am trying to get it to work at home. I have a server with a Tyan 2882, 2x AMD Opteron processors, 12Gb ram and two LSI Megaraid 300 controllers.

If I have a SATA drive connected to the motherboard I can load ESXi on the SATA drive but it will not find the drives connected to the LSI controllers. I can load a guest OS and it works find. But don't want to operate with only one drive.

If I remove the SATA drive from the MB (locks up during the device discovery during boot up) I can load ESX it finds the LSI controllers, I can format the drives, and load ESX but it won't boot. I get a cannot find the boot partition error.

Anyone have any ideas how I can get this to work?

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Dave_Mishchenko
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Which editor are you using? If you're not using it, I would suggest nano - http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/reu/nano.html. At the console

1) nano /etc/vmware/pciid/sata_nv.xml

2) edit the text

3) ctrl + X to exit and save.

View solution in original post

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khughes
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I'm about 99% sure that your motherboard isn't on the approved HCL list, but that hasn't stopped many people from getting non-supported hardware working. What is probably giving you the most trouble is the SATA Raid controller, and if you maybe go with a different raid controller that is supported or find one that someone has tested known to work (but not on the HCL) I would go that direction. Sata and controllers are extremely hit or miss if they aren't on the HCL.

Maybe you can find something helpful, or controllers that might work in your system in this thread -

  • Kyle

PS- welcome to the forums and good luck on getting your home system up

Message was edited by: khughes

-- Kyle "RParker wrote: I guess I was wrong, everything CAN be virtualized "
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Dave_Mishchenko
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Welcome to the VMware Community forums. Are you using ESX or ESXi?

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admin5
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Dave, I tried both. I found this a few minutes ago after following several different discussions

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1063761#1063761

I will try it later and see if it works.

Thanks, John

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Dave_Mishchenko
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I've moved your thread to the ESXi forum for now. One thing to be aware of is that the thread you mention only applies to ESXi. ESX uses a different manner of storing PCI ID info.

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admin5
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Is it any easier to get it working on ESX server vice ESXi?

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Dave_Mishchenko
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With ESXi the process would be similar to this - http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3.5/SATA_mounting_root_failed.html and might be a bit easier.

admin5
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Dave I know this is an old tread, but I gave up on the system in favor of other projects.

Your last post directed me to Which looks like the correct course of action. Problem is I am not a command line kind a guy and do not know the syntax to use to open and modify the file from the service console. I tried edit, modify, and open but get command error. So if you would be so kind as to tell me what I type to edit the magaraid2.xml file. I know that all I need to do is change the ID from 0408 to 0409 but not sure how to edit the file.

As a recap I installed ESX 3.5 on a Tyan motherboard. I have 2ea LSI Megaraid SATA-300 cards in there. I can install ESX by selecting the megaraid driver during the install but when it reboots I get a mounting root failed. I can boot into the service console and login.

Thank you,

John

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Dave_Mishchenko
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Which editor are you using? If you're not using it, I would suggest nano - http://mintaka.sdsu.edu/reu/nano.html. At the console

1) nano /etc/vmware/pciid/sata_nv.xml

2) edit the text

3) ctrl + X to exit and save.

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admin5
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That worked like a champ. Quit a bit easier than all the other suff I was reading about modifing the install CD and booting into linix and running scripts.

Thanks again Dave.

Regards,

John

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admin5
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continuing on the issue stated in the previous message, It appears the ESX is seeing both controllers, but has configured them as multi path to 1 of the arrays rather than seeing separate storage on each. Under storage adapters in the Infrastructure client I see:

LSI Logic MegaRaid

vmhba2

vmhba3

Both show a canonical path of vmhba2:0:0.

vmhba2 is configured with a 200gb RAID 5,

vmhba3 has a 695 GB RAID 5.

Any idea how I can force ESX to see these as separate controllers and not multipathed?

Thanks!

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