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virtualrs
Contributor
Contributor

SATA Support?

Hi forum any info about what SATA controllers are supported with esx4/4i?

Thanks,

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richard6121
Contributor
Contributor

I have it running on a Lenovo M58 with the on-board ICH10 SATA controller in AHCI mode. CD-ROM works, too.

virtualrs
Contributor
Contributor

How is the performance? Do you get good speed on windows vm?

Thanks!

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grcumm
Contributor
Contributor

Intel ICH8M on a Dell Latitude D630 (yes, a laptop. NOT a good production machine but great for test/eval/demo or recovery). Somewhere in the release notes or documentation, VMware mentions the Intel ICH9

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1090304 for my experiments with the D630.

azn2kew
Champion
Champion

It also works fine on Asus P5M2/SAS & SATA as well, just upgraded and works great and good performance. Running 2 x 500SATA drive.

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!!

Regards,

Stefan Nguyen

VMware vExpert 2009

iGeek Systems Inc.

VMware, Citrix, Microsoft Consultant

If you found this information useful, please consider awarding points for "Correct" or "Helpful". Thanks!!! Regards, Stefan Nguyen VMware vExpert 2009 iGeek Systems Inc. VMware vExpert, VCP 3 & 4, VSP, VTSP, CCA, CCEA, CCNA, MCSA, EMCSE, EMCISA
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The-Kevster
Contributor
Contributor

I'm using an Adaptec 2405 with two mirrors. Very fast card and I've installed the x86 version of the Adaptec Storage Manager (x64 wouldn't install due to missing libraries)

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virtualrs
Contributor
Contributor

Stefan Nguyen, are your drives conected to SAS controller or the SATA one?

One more quick help please, if possible please copy a big file like 5 gigs within your windows VM (from local disk to local disk) and time it to get an estimate of write speed?

Thanks in advance!!!

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rmrobert
VMware Employee
VMware Employee

Your copy speed would depend on what type of hard disks you have connected. If you have a SSD, you will see very fast performance. I think your general question is more of a 'Does SATA perform as one would expect or are there huge overheads/inefficiencies?'

The answer is that SATA support works as advertised, and we don't introduce any exceptional performance penality, so your performance will depend mainly on what you are connected to.

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matthewfirth
Contributor
Contributor

Does ESXi v4 include CIM support for any of Adaptec's RAID cards? i.e. is the health status of the drives being reported through the management interface so I can see if my RAID set is still running OK or if a disk has dropped out?

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The-Kevster
Contributor
Contributor

No it doesn't. But the x86 version of the Adaptec Storage Manager works really well. It sends email on a drive failure / drive inserted / rebuild started / rebuild complete so it's got complete coverage.

As a side note...

Using the ASM I successfully created a VMFS on two 80GB mirrored disks. Swapped both 80GB disks for 250GBs letting the RAID rebuild between swaps. Expanded the array to cover the 250GB and then used vSphere to expand the VMFS. Without a single restart or shutdown of a VM which was on that partition using only the Adaptec Storage Manager and vSphere clients.

Highly recommended!!!

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xerox7700
Contributor
Contributor

Which lenovo M58 and with what version of vm

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draj
Contributor
Contributor

Hi.

Could you explain how do you use Adaptec Storage Manager with ESXi? IS it installed on vm? Or on ESXi? I could not understand how is possible to manage storage controller that way?

Could you please describe it?

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