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keying
Contributor
Contributor

Instability with PCI SATA Controller 3512

I've been struggling to get my Dell Studio 540 whitebox working with ESXi for several weeks now.

I had thought that I had found a winning combination by using a PCIe NIC with a PCI SATA Controller based on the SiI3512 chipset but it seems to be highly unstable as the disks appear to be detected during POST and creation of datastores within ESXi but once we try to add virtual machines to either datastore, ESXi just freezes, and we get various SCSI errors in the log.

Have any of you encountered instability or generally poor performance with your 3512-based installs?

We're probably just going to return these whiteboxes and replace them with HP Workstations.

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asatoran
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Poor performance, yes, but no instability in my whiteboxes. And I'm using a really cheap ($30) PNY PCI card. Have you tried any troubleshooting like trying differnt PCI slots or differnt hard drives? Any other burn-in testing of memory or CPU, etc?

How many hard drives do you have in the system? (And other drives.) I've had systems that can't handle 2 HDs, even through the power supply claimed to be 450VA. Those systems would have things that would appear to be bad hard drives or DVD drives, or bad memory or other crashes. Replace the power supply and all was good. The Studio series is sold under the "home" type of system. So while it would be reasonable to assume you can add a 2nd hard drive, the power supply might not be good enough if it's multiple terabyte drives.

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keying
Contributor
Contributor

Just 2 640GB drives. Haven't tried it in another PCI slot yet.

ESXi would install but when adding a VM w/ a lot of I/O would result in a freeze. For example, I could upload ISOs of Windows 2003 into the datastore, then boot up a VM using the ISO to install, but then I'd get a hang @ Console and freeze at the "39 minutes remaining..." screen.

ESXi itself doesn't appear frozen, just accessing the drives (even df doesnt show the drives anymore after the Windows install freezes).

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asatoran
Immortal
Immortal

If by "a lot of I/O" you mean disk I/O, then the SATA controller could be a problem. The PNY controller I have says SATA II, but I don't quite believe it as far as throughput is concerned. And systems with a lot of disk I/O often aren't good candidates for virtualization. But you're saying that it's freezing during the install? If you're running other VMs that are with heavy disk I/O while trying to install another VM, then this could be a problem since the SATA controller doesn't have the best throughput. I haven't had a problem with installing new VMs, but the other VMs that's running on my whitebox usually aren't doing anything in the background so the VM I'm concentrating on has the majority of the bandwidth.

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xmasin
Contributor
Contributor

Hello, I have same problem. I have bought ST-LAB SATA controller witch chipset Silicon Image 3512. I'm able to install ESXi server without problem, but when I try to install any system in virtual machine instalation freezes. I found, that this problem is only with newer HDD. I have older WD 500 GB SATA I disk and this disk working fine, but when I bought new WD 320 GB SATA II HDD I have this problems. I didn't know how to solve this problem.

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asatoran
Immortal
Immortal

Hello, I have same problem. I have bought ST-LAB SATA controller witch chipset Silicon Image 3512. I'm able to install ESXi server without problem, but when I try to install any system in virtual machine instalation freezes. I found, that this problem is only with newer HDD. I have older WD 500 GB SATA I disk and this disk working fine, but when I bought new WD 320 GB SATA II HDD I have this problems. I didn't know how to solve this problem.

Many SATA II drives have a jumper setting to slow them down to SATA 1 speed (150MB/s or 1.5Gbps.) See if your drive has such a jumper setting. I had to do that with one Samsung SATA II drive I installed in a HP that only had a SATA 1 controller. Other SATA II drives were fine, but the Windows would keep reporting errors on the Samsung drive until I set the jumper to the slower speed.

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xmasin
Contributor
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I know about this option, but when I tried it, it didn't help. I have change HDD to SATA I disk and this disk is working without any problems. So I think, that there is some incompactibility between SATA controller based on SIL 3512 controller and WD HDD with SATA II.

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