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eger
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Quest for decent SATA/SAS RAID card with CIM monitoring for ESXi - Options?

So I have now tried the Adaptec 2405 and LSI 8704ELP cards for ESXi. The Adaptec is screamin fast. But has no CIM managment (can't see in ESXi if a drive has failed). The LSI 8704ELP has BBU option and CIM monitoring. But I am getting less than half the drive I/O than the 2405 (260 MB/s compared to the LSI ~120 MB/s).

Are there any other choices for SAS/SATA RAID with CIM monitoring? Am I the only one trying to do hardware RAID with some sort of monitoring on ESXi? I surely cannot be the only one...

What are others using for their hardware RAID in ESXi?

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dpuckett
Contributor
Contributor

If ESXi can see your RAID and individual drives under 'Health Status', you can configure an external syslog server, enable snmp, point the trap target to the loopback address (since we dont care about the traps...just that it gets logged), and configure a trigger on your syslog server. Here is an example of a Dell 2950 using the free ESXi. I pulled a drive from the array and got these messages.

2009-05-27 13:16:27 Local4.Info 192.168.3.104 May 27 13:14:56 Hostd: 2009-05-27 13:14:56.220 79681B90 verbose 'App' Snmpsvc: UpdateSensor found key 'Drive 1 in enclosure 32 on controller 0 Fw: HS09 - REBUILD'

2009-05-27 13:16:27 Local4.Info 192.168.3.104 May 27 13:14:56 Hostd: 2009-05-27 13:14:56.221 79681B90 verbose 'App' Snmpsvc: UpdateSensor found key 'RAID 5 Virtual Disk 0 Logical Volume 0 on controller 0, Drives(0e32,1e32,2e32) - DEGRADED'

2009-05-27 13:16:27 Local4.Info 192.168.3.104 May 27 13:14:56 Hostd: 2009-05-27 13:14:56.221 79681B90 verbose 'Snmpsvc' UpdateSystemIssues:[5] item: 'VMware Rollup Health State' State: 'red'

If anyone has a better solution for me It would appreciated. This was all I could come up with.

eger
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

This is a really good monitoring idea. But I was more looking for cards supporting the health monitoring in general. The problem I am having is that I cannot find any SAS/SATA RAID that supports the health monitoring other than the LSI 8708 and LSI 8704.

-Andy

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Ritmo2k
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Eger,

I have those same cards... Since you have both the adaptec and lsi and know how you benched it, why don't you send and email to support@lsi.com as they have been fairly helpful to me in the past and possibly they might have some configuration help that can improve that.

Keep us posted.

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eger
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

I did contact them and they were not very helpful since I couldn't provide them the driver/module version used in ESXi. But they did suggest I try different stripe sizes which I have not done yet. Will go back to benchmarking with ESXi 4x soon (all this was done on 3.5).

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Ritmo2k
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

What type of array did you use on both controllers? I assume you used the same discs?

Thanks for reply.

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eger
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Yes, I used same drives. I setup RAID 10 on both controller and am testing with Western Digital Velociraptor 150G. The drives are VERY fast and it shows with the Adaptec 2405. But the performance on the LSI 8704ELP is closer to that I get with normal 7200 RPM drives (maybe slightly faster). It is liveable and I will probably end up using it this way. But it is just disappointing that the Adaptec that desn't have CIM support is so much faster without tweaking Smiley Sad

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beng
Contributor
Contributor

G'day Eger,

This is going to sound really stupid, but how did you get ESXi 4.0 to recognise the Adaptec 2405?

As per

We have drawn a blank when trying to install ESXi.

Rgds Ben

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eger
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Hi, I did not try yet. As my previous post states I was doing this testing on ESXi 3.5. So I updated to 4.0 using the LSI controller and did not yet try the Adaptec. Is it now removed from 4.0 support? THis is strange....

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beng
Contributor
Contributor

G'day Eger,

My mistake, I just assumed it was v4.0 since it is in the ESXi4 thread.

RE Support, well I don't know what is going on here, as we have just run the ESXi3.5Update 4 installer, and it can't find the 2405 card either!

So it is really a mess.

We got the Intel SR2600 becuase we had used the SR2/1500's and they have been really good. The SR2600 uses the S5520UR board which is on the HCL and uses the Xeon 55xx

So I am beginning to suspect it may be a weird incompatibility between the 2405 and the S5520UR, but the odd thing about that is we can see the 2405 Bios, and configure the drives. (I know the 2405 is NOT on the HCL, but the 2445 is, which is the same card minus the external ports)

Our next tests will be to see if we can install just a straight Windows 2008 server, and/or boot a KNoppix and see if lspci shows anything....

Ben

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eger
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

This is strange. I don't know why they would drop the 2405 from ESXi 4.0. I will test this weekend though and do my speed comparisons again. I am currently only timing dd writing a large 2GB file and using hdparm to test cache and read speed in both scenario.

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beng
Contributor
Contributor

G'day,

While it is still not on the HCL, our 2405 now works fine. It turned out it was a problem with the Riser slots in the SR2600, it has 2 PCIex8 and 1 PCIex16. ESXi just could not see it if the card was in either of the x8 slots....even though it's a x8 card.

Will do a bit of performance testing over the weekend and report the results.

Rgds Ben

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Dave_Mishchenko
Immortal
Immortal

Is that with ESXi 3.5 or 4.0?

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beng
Contributor
Contributor

G'day Dave,

ESXi v4.0 (And for the record 3.5 U4 also recognised the Array, we just aborted before completing the installation, but I have no reason to think it would not have continued.)

One extra twist RE the x8 and x16 PCIe slots was when in the PCIex8 slot, it was also actually recognised as a bootable device, ie it flashed up a few .tgz files and then aborted the boot with missing files (I think that was the error).

Rgds Ben.

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informec
Contributor
Contributor

I know the 2405 works with 4.0 U1 but there's no monitoring.

Has anyone come up with a way to do this short of CIM support in the driver?

I am looking at an LSI card next, but I'd like to get this 2405 to work.

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