ESX 3.5 and Adaptec 2610SA SATA Raid for white box

[Virtuali3ed]

Hi forum, Just wanted your input about Asaptec 2610 SA SATA Raid with ESX 3.5. I read in other post that this controller works for 3.0.2 but does this work with 3.5.

Thanks in advance!

[Dave_Mishchenko]

In the file /etc/vmware/pciid/aacraid_esx30.xml the card is mapped to the aacraid_esx30 driver so you should be OK. If you look at /etc/vmware/esx.conf on your system right now, the card should be listed with a vendor of 9005 and device ID of 0285

<device id="0285:103c:3227">

<vmware label="scsi">

<driver>aacraid_esx30</driver>

</vmware>

<name>AAR-2610SA PCI SATA 6ch</name>

</device>

[Virtuali3ed]

Thanks Dave, I will check it as soon as I get this one. One more doubt..

Is this a PCI or PCI X card? I looked around on google and some sites say its PCI others say PCI X?

If it is PCI X then would it work with PCI?

Thanks,

[Dave_Mishchenko]

I'm not sure which it is, but a PCI-X card will work in a PCI slot but

1) it will operate at half the speed that it would in a PCI-X slot

2) the PCI slot has to have a notch in it (3.3 V support) (see image - this is the case with most new MBs) and clearance on the motherboard for the part of the PCI-X connector that will extend beyond the slot

[ian_fretwell]

If you're still in the market for a suitable motherboard too then I wholeheartedly recommend the ASUS M2N-LR as this will provide you with the correct PCI-X slots and the bonus of it's onboard NIC's being natively supported Broadcom 5721's. I have this config with a LSI MegaRaid SATA 150-6 raid card (very similar to the 2610 you mention). Works a treat.

[Virtuali3ed]

Thanks Ian, I am actually looking for one and I am an AMD Asus fan. Would this be able to run new Quad cores Phenom / Barcelona, any idea?

Thanks,

[ian_fretwell]

Hi, I've asked Asus that very question - their response was 'no'. Although I guess this could change, the board is capable of supplying the right voltages etc, so it's just down to whether they'll release a bios upgrade for it. I personally think it's more likely to happen (if it happens) when the Opteron 1000 series quad cores are released (since the CPU support chart for the board has only ever shown Opteron CPU's even though it recognizes Athlon X2's fine - mine's a 4600+ by the way).

[Virtuali3ed]

Thanks Ian!!

[JanPekman]

The adapter works just fine out of the box.(in a NF6100 motherboard and in a HP ML115)

I'm only thinking about MCP55 onboard SATA because of perhaps an improvement in performance. Though I have no real complaints except for faster is alway better

[172pilotsteve]

You say it's supported natively, so I bought a couple of these cards, and my ESX 3.5 update 4 disk is still not seeing them.. Any ideas? Do I have to hack the ISO for this card??

Thanks!

[Texiwill]

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[Rumple]

I had 2 servers with the 2610SA cards in them and its seen fine for vmfs volumes using the standard ISO. I can't remember if it also shows up for the Service console but i would assume so.

You may want to go into the BIOS of the system and disable the COM, Parallel, sound (if present) and USB (if you are not using them) hardware and see if the controllers show up.

Could be an IRQ conflict

[172pilotsteve]

Interesting.. I'll give it a shot, disabling all the hardware.. I dont THINK that's it, as hardware-wise, I seem to be able to see/manage the controller just fine, and other OS installs see it, but the ESX just takes me to a "No controller found / install drivers" screen. I could probably install drivers I guess.. IF I could find them..

Maybe I'll drop a SCSI controller and drive in there, just for the OS and see if it'll let me house the VMs on the SATA..

Thanks!!

-Steve

[IT_Admin_to_the]

Hello All,

this is a pretty old post, but I was wondering if you can help us in being able to install ESX on a white box machine with an adaptec 2610SA controller. So far, we've only been able to get as far as creating the RAID array's (we have 5 drives in there and were planning on using 2 for the ESX OS install in a mirrored RAID, and 3 for RAID 5 where the actual VMs etc were going to sit).

However, when we try to install ESX, we see a red window pop up trying to load the aacraid_esx30 or some similar driver but then fails by saying "Unable to find any devices of the type needed for this installation type. Would like to manually select your driver or use a driver disk?". If we select "Manually Choose" then aacraid is not in the list. If we say "use driver disk" and insert a floppy with the aacraid driver for linux (RHEL4) then it reads the disk, and brings the dialog "No devices of the appropriate type were found on the driver disk. Would like to manually select the driver, continue anyway, or load another driver disk". Here if we choose "manually choose", we see the aacraid driver in the list now, but selecting it brings back the ""Unable to find any devices of the type needed for this installation type. Would like to manually select your driver or use a driver disk?" dialog box.

Does anyone have any idea how to fix this and install ESX on this machine with this raid controller?

Thank you so much in advance.

Knoa IT

[vrrtuos0]

i have the same RAID card installed on my HP xw6200 server.

ESX 3.5 (all updates) were able to detect the controller. I was even able to setup a RAID 0, with 2x400GB HDDs.

It is currently being used as a VMFS datastore. The VMs are running off this controller.