LSI 9260 SAS storage controller

[justin2net]

I am evaluating the vSphere suite with a whitebox system that is otherwise compliant with the HCL.

I have a LSI 9260-8i controller that is not recognized by ESX. It is not listed on the storage page in vSphere client.

Lspci on the service console reveals that it is a "LSI Logic / Symbios Logic Unknown Device rev 03" (PCIID I have to retrieve again).

I tried editing the /etc/vmware/megaraid.xml by changing the PCIID of an entry (LSI 1064) to the PCIID of my controller, then running esxcfg-pciid and rebooting. It did not show up on vSphere client after reboot.

Lspci again showed that it was now recognized as LSI 1064. So I know that change was effective.

LSI does provide an ESX driver,

though repeated attempts to install it result in an "obsoleted package". I mounted the ISO, ran esxupdate --bundle offline-bundle.zip update and it would result in "did not install, obsoleted".

Is there a way to force install these drivers? Do I have to do them at ESX installation?

Thank you.

Eventually I want to be able to use PCI pass through with a VT-D mobo and attach this controller to a Solaris VM to run a ZFS storage, thus bypassing the VMFS "layer".

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[Magigimmix]

Thank You - that is exactly what I am working on.

I have the machine running off the USB stick with ESXi 4 and the only thing missing is the megaraid SAS driver. Painful, but I am confident that I will get there. I wish that there was an F8 method to insert a driver on the fly.

Magi.

[vostok4]

Did you ever get it?

I was looking to get a 9260-4i controller (great specs, price is right), but I was worried about driver integration issues.

[Magigimmix]

I gave up as I could not get the system to boot with the OEM drivers. I got a PSOD after two tries. Others have gotten it to work so I must be doing something wrong.

I finally went with another card that has support in ESXi 4.

Magi.

[Mindflux]

It all comes down to the simple.map and pci.ids files.

I'm not sure if the device ID changes any depending on which slot you have the card in. I never experienced the PSOD though.. weird.

[vostok4]

So Mindflux, as soon as you had the devid figured out (via lspci), all was good? Have you been using it since? How is the performance, any bugs?

[Mindflux]

Yes once I had the proper id figured out from lspci and dropped it into pci.ids and simple.map (you can see my attachment on the first page) via the oem.tgz "modification".

This is our production box, it's running SBS 2008 and Server 2008 (just two VM's on it right now). Sequential read/writes (512k size) with IOMETER on a 6x 15k 300GB Cheetah 15k7 (SAS2) array is up around 650MB/s in a RAID6 configuration.

[KaiVuri]

Is there health monitoring capabilities for LSI MegaRaid 9260 controllers in ESXi 4.0(.1)?

Do the controllers work well if you just manage to install them?

They are listed on VMware Compatibility Guide, but could someone confirm that they are working (and there are health/management possibilities)?

Thanks,

Kai

[KaiVuri]

Thanks for all these replies. For other Googlers: Yes it does work: http://img397.imageshack.us/img397/5733/lsimegaraidwesxi.png