Why does VMware not support ICH9R?

[Brandorr]

Please don't answer "It's fake RAID". For RAID1, support for software RAID should be a no brainer. Performance overhead should theoretically be very low. (And with computers getting faster and faster, throwing a little general purpose horsepower at a problem that is more expensive to solve with dedicated hardware just makes sense)

Can someone from VMware please tell me whether or not support for ICH9R is on the roadmap? (In particular RAID 1 support) If not, why not?

Thanks,

Brian

P.S. - It's annoying that right now the only solution for this is Mocrosoft's Hyper-V as the host OS.

[TiJa]

Because it is fake RAID ;).

I can think of several reasons:

• You need additional drivers for soft raid management (they need to be compiled into the vmkernel). This is not desireable since the vmkernel should be a compact piece of code that fits 98% of customer needs. I have never seen a production environment run on software RAID.

• Software RAID uses CPU power which is lost from the virtual machines, and even worse, from PCPU0 that also hosts the service console. In larger environments (where the consolidation ratio is high) the service console console already takes a fair amount of resources (hostd/vpxa). Why risk impacting that by running more on that single PCPU0?

• RAID monitoring/recovery requires tools that need to run in the service console... Again something you don't want to stress.

Trust me, a hardware RAID card is worth the investment. I picked up a second hand RAID controller on eBay for less than $100 for my home system. Best $100 ever spent on my ESX box!

[Nemasis]

VMware includes only a specific list of drivers because they test those drivers with there corresponding hradware. If it proves to be unstable, its not included. The target for ESXi is the enterprise market for production environments to get people on board with virtualization. If they included drivers for every known hardware configuration, you'd end up with an unstable system, because they wouldn't be able to test al those drivers. Look at Windows...Its a bloated pig. In a production environment stability is the name of the game. There is a HCL and one can build a machine using supported hardware for a modest sum. Also check out vm-help.com There is a list of hardware that will work with ESXi, but is not supported bby vmware.

Nemasis

[RParker]

Awesome you should make this a part of your tag and post this whenever possible. Great explanation.

[RParker]

Can someone from VMware please tell me whether or not support for ICH9R is on the roadmap?

I/O Controller Hub (ICH), also known as Intel 82801, is an Intel microchip used as on with Intel (). As with any other southbridge, the ICH is used to connect and control peripheral devices.

SCSI/SAS offer much better performance.

Since ESX intent is for performance and NOT external peripheral devices, that's why they don't support it. ESX is for virtualization and consolidation. It's not for everyone, it has a very SPECIFIC purpose. VM's that are modest in CPU / Memory and need to be easily and centrally managed. ESX does NOT support Serial, USB, Sound, and any other external devices. That's NOT the target market.

So you will not see ICH9 on the roadmap, there is no need. There is VM Server, Workstation and Player for this. ESX is a high end, migration environment. Keep in mind that perfipheral are tied to the system. Allowing support for such external devices defeats the ENTIRE purpose of migration and high availability.

[nick_couchman]

Yes, but ICH9 also includes a storage SATA controller, so it is a valid question for storage purposes - but storage purposes only. Also, Intel ICH9 is supported in ESX(i) - it just is not supported in RAID mode. As already mentioned, this is mainly due to the fact that the ICH9R controller is a FAKE RAID controller, meaning that it doesn't have a separate RAID processor and requires special drivers be loaded into the operating system for the RAID functionality to operate correctly. I highly doubt that VMware will EVER support fake RAIDs in ESX/ESXi - it is not targeted at the cheap hardware market, it's targeted at the Enterprise market where Dell, HP, IBM, etc., are prevalent. The fact that it happens to work on some commodity "whitebox" hardware is just a bonus - albeit one that a lot of us are interested in taking advantage of. Anyway, you are correct that VMware is not targetting support for external USB, Sound, etc., but this chipset is actually already supported in ESX and ESXi - at least as much as possible.

[nick_couchman]

Yes, but ESX isn't targeted at people with software RAID arrays. Sorry, nothing personal, but that's the truth. VMware purposely limits their support for this kind of functionality, and, as has already been mentioned, a hardware RAID card is a good thing to spend money on. 3ware makes some very nice cards for very affordable prices - especially if you need RAID 1 only (two channels). And, while 3ware cards are not Supported by VMware by default, 3ware has a driver you can inject into ESX/ESXi to allow you to use them on these platforms.

Also, I wouldn't say that Hyper-V is the only solution for a host O/S - Linux has support for several fake RAID chipsets, as well as software RAID support, and so you could easily run Linux with Xen on a system like this. Personally, I'd rather do software RAID in the host O/S than fake RAID - too many bad experiences with losing data on fake RAID controllers - but that's just my preference.