VMware Cloud Community
atomikramp
Contributor
Contributor
‎02-17-2009 01:51 AM

ESXi LVM?

hello everybody,

i'm pretty new to VMWare virtualization platform and i have a question for you.

i have a server i have to run ESXi on, wich has a damnly crap fakeRAID controller.

so when i try to install VMWare ESXi the raid array is not recognized and disks are shown separately.

i was wondering if there was a way to let vmware itself handle the task with something similar to linux LVM.

i've a similar setup on an equal machine using xen, and it works pretty fine.

else it becomes pretty hard to manage virtual disks for the VMs if i have to fit them in single HDs instead of dealing with a single storage.

sorry for my bad english.

Reply
0 Kudos
8 Replies
R-Sommer
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎02-17-2009 02:04 AM

Welcome to the forum. ESXi isn't capable of using LVM nor fakeRAID controllers. Sorry for bad news.

Reply
0 Kudos
atomikramp
Contributor
Contributor
‎02-17-2009 02:11 AM

Damn Smiley Sad

that's really a BAD news Smiley Sad

Reply
0 Kudos
nick_couchman
Immortal
Immortal
‎02-17-2009 10:19 AM

There are some failry decenet real RAID controlers out there for a decent price - check out the VMware HCL and look at some of the chipsets, then do some searches for products that use those chipsets. It may take a little time, but you should be able to find one for a couple hundred bucks.

Also, as far as LVM, ESX(i) has its own volume management system, so even though it doesn't support LVM specifically, it does its own volume management.

Reply
0 Kudos
atomikramp
Contributor
Contributor
‎02-17-2009 12:09 PM

well, since it's not for production purposes but just for testing, i don't have any budget to invest for a raid controller.

you said ESX(i) has it's own volume management.

is it possible to aggregate multiple hard drive in a way so that i can use it as a single big storage? no metter it's not called LVM, since that's wat LVM actually does.

Reply
0 Kudos
Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal
‎02-17-2009 02:24 PM

You can use extents to join up to 32 - 2 TB LUNs into a single volume. It's not necessarily recommended to use as loss of a single extent will have consequences on the entire volume.

Reply
0 Kudos
nick_couchman
Immortal
Immortal
‎02-17-2009 02:28 PM

...but, it is exactly what LVM does...

Reply
0 Kudos
atomikramp
Contributor
Contributor
‎02-17-2009 03:26 PM

it works pretty fine with extents Smiley Happy

thnx a lot for the help

Reply
0 Kudos
R-Sommer
Enthusiast
Enthusiast
‎02-17-2009 11:02 PM

The cheapest SATA RAID controller I found costs about 160,-- EUR. I'm still not convinced buying it for my home server, so actually I'm using two SATA disks having software RAID within the more important VMs.

Reply
0 Kudos