Hello everyone. Nice to meet to you.
I have a strange things about hard-raid drives. Could you please advise to me?
I set a sas-sata raid card with LSI 1068E controler, to Xeon Nehalem machine.
Put it 2 SATA Hard drives.
I create a RAID 1 mirroring , and installed ESX4.1.0, installed some guest VM successfuly.
Then logon to ESX by vSpher Client. Configuration tab says 1 drives, I think its raid1 drive.
Storage adapter is vmhba0 only, path is vmhba0:C1:T0:L0.
So I blieve that my esx is running on raid1 drive correctry.
BUT.. on esx console, (put ALT+F1 screen), I can see 2 drives by fdisk -l /dev/sda and fdisk -l /dev/sdb command.
The partition is not same sda and sdb.
I create raid1, so the drive sda1 and sdb1 is same partion, I think. but why not?, why I can see 2 drives.
Is this true? or something misstake?
Hi Catjumper68,
Welcome to the forums.
It should be because your LSI controller is not able to manage RAID directly with its firmware but should rely on a software or driver. As ESX does not contain this piece of software, it should not be able to manage the RAID configuration so it sees two separated disks.
Have a look at your device documentation to see how to use it and if the RAID feature is compatible with vSphere. Check if it needs a special software or driver for other operating systems to support RAID configs.
Good luck.
Regards
Franck
Thank you FranckRookie.
For certainly, VMware compatibility guide said LSI1068E needs a device driver.
So now, my machine is not raid1 mirroring, isn't it.
It's terrible !
Later, I will check that one drive is reject, a new drive put on, and rebuild start, repaire done or not.
can you post the result of you fdisk -l ?
It's normal to see 2 disks: 1 is the physical disk, the other is the esxconsole.vmdk, the virtual disk containing the console VM.
I use 2 drives. Each drive is 500GB capacity.
certainly I wondered why /dev/sdb is only 8GB capacity.
fdisk -l said as follows
Disk /dev/sda: 499.9 GB, 499999834112 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 60788 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sda1 * 1 140 1124518+ 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 141 154 112455 fc VMware VMKCORE
/dev/sda3 155 60788 487042605 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 155 60788 487042573+ fb VMware VMFS
Disk /dev/sdb: 8730 MB, 8730443776 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1061 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/sdb1 1 169 1357461 82 Linux swap / Solaris
/dev/sdb2 170 423 2040255 83 Linux
/dev/sdb3 424 1061 5124735 5 Extended
/dev/sdb5 424 1061 5124703+ 83 Linux
Two possibilities:
1) If the drives are not actually mirroring correctly, then it's likely you have a "fake RAID" controller that does not actually have an on-board RAID processor, but relies on the main processor to do the RAID work. As someone already mentioned, these cards rely on drivers loaded into the base operating system to accomplish the RAID tasks, and aren't usually supported by ESX.
2) Some newer versions of RAID controllers actually do tell the O/S what drives are part of the RAID array. I notice this on the Dell PowerEdge 11th Generation series (R610, for example), when I do "lsscsi" in Linux, I see the RAID array plus the drives that are part of the array. I can't actually access the drives individually, and the RAID controller takes care of all the mirroring, but it gives you visibility into what drives are actually part of that RAID set.
That's what it always looks like in ESX 4; /dev/sdb is your console vmdk, which is located on the VMFS partition of /dev/sda
If you look at your host configuration, storage adapters section, you'll see how your controller and disk are recognised.
I look at my host configuration, storage adapters section,
appeared are
onboard device is vmhba1, it has no path
LSI1068E is vmhba0, path is vmhba0:C1:T0:L0, LUN 0, device name is LSILOGIC Serial Attached SCSI Disk (naa.600508e.......)
LSILOGIC Serial Attached SCSI Disk (naa.600508e.......)
looks to me like your mirroring is working fine.
Disk is detected as an LSILOGIC logical disk, just like you'd see on an HP or other RAID controller.
Otherwise you would see the disk as whatever the actual physical disk is: hitachi, maxtor, ...
Thank you very much everyone.
I'll try the rebuilding process later. then I will post the result.
thankyou.
Sorry to very late.
The rebuilding process was completed.
On the esx console, (put ALT+F1 screen), I can see 2 drives. This is correctory.
I installed the esx to single hard drive machine, and I also see 2 drives.
Thank you.