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gmopic
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Unstable datastores using PERC 5/i Integrated controllers ESXi 4 Update 1

Hello,

Previously had an ESXi 3.5 installation working fine and booting from a USB flash drive. My system uses two Dell PERC 5i Integrated adapters. Shut down the system and rebooted it on another USB flash device with ESXi 4 Update 1 (currently unlicensed). I looked on the HCL and the PERC controllers appear to be on there. The new version seems to boot up fine but there are no datastores in the client. So I started to experiment and created a datastore on the vmhba1 controller. In the "add storage" wizard I did this: chose Disk/LUN --> highlight vmhba1 --> next screen says disk is blank though it was not when used under ESXi3.5 --> enter name "slow-disk" --> chose the smallest block size setting "256GB, Block size: 1 MB" --> click finish. The system seems to create the datastore. But when I start to browse the data store and copy a file to it, it begins and seems to copy then produces an I/O error. If I reboot, the storage diappears.

I have seen references to using some command line utils esxcfg-volume and fdisk -l for persistent mounting. But this I/O issue seems strange.

Are the Perc 5/i Integrated controllers indeed supported?

Do I have to use a certain BIOS version for those controllers (I did update them to recent BIOS code that worked with ESXi 3.5)?

Any ideas are welcome.

Thanks

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J1mbo
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Battery backed write cache - an ECC Registered DIMM (up to 512MB) on the controller and a lithium ion rechargable battery pack connected to it.

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J1mbo
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Perc 5i should work perfectly with U1. Needs the BBWC installed to though, horrid performance without it.

- With inital release of 4, the caches were not flushed on shutdown and volumes could be corrupted.

- vmware fixed this with a patch release (not sure of build).

- Pre U1 "lost connectivity with storage" events appeared occasionally, although these didn't affect performance seemingly.

- Post U1 all issues seem to be resolved.

I'm running 5.1.1-0040 on mine.

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gmopic
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Sorry.... what is BBWC?

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J1mbo
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Battery backed write cache - an ECC Registered DIMM (up to 512MB) on the controller and a lithium ion rechargable battery pack connected to it.

Please award points to any useful answer.

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gmopic
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I am running firmware 7.0.1-0066. Do you think there is any merit or advantage to trying to drop back to a previous firmware version? Also I have my firmware BIOS turned off.

Thanks

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J1mbo
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I don't think I'd downgrade the firmware to start with.., how about enabling the controllers BIOS for starters?

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burtrom
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Out of curiosity, how big are your RAID arrays? My guess, from what you've said, is that you have an array that is larger than 2TB. This worked in ESX(i) 3.5 but doesn't not work in 4. The maximum size your array (LUN) size can be is 2TB (dumb). If you're running RAID 0, 1 or 5 on a PERC 5/i, you have the option to set your Virtual Disk (VD) size. If you're running RAID 10 or 50, it must take up the entire space; you can't select a smaller size. (Flat-out-stupid)

It sucks. I wanted to use 4 X 1.5TB drives in a RAID 10 and friggin' can't. I spent 3 days wasting time trying to figure out how only to find out I can't. I'm having to settle for 2 X 1.5TB RAID 1s and just alternate VMs disk usage to keep them running better.

Hope it helps.

Tony

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J1mbo
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That issue is also present on the PERC-6 - even a "limit LUN to 2TB" option would help.

Although running two LUNs on Raid-5 might be better, as individually your VMs are limited to a single mirror performance (although theoretical overall throughput is better as you have it, this is dependent upon sufficient concurrency being present between the running VMs).

HTH

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evandena
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I was experiencing all sorts of problems with my Perc 5i and ESXi U1. Either I could not "find boot partition", or couldn't create a datastore.

Turns out, I had to disable VT-d in the motherboard BIOS and then everything worked as expected. Other people have had this issue too.

I know this is more of a work around than a solution... at some point I hope VMware fixes this.

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mvrk
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I've tried Dell Perc 5/i on both ESXi 4 / 5 and it hangs at boot (Loading scheduler...)

Maybe it doesn't like my motherboard? My board doesn't even have vt-d or IOMMU option (Gigabyte GA-790FXTA-UD5)

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