Marvell with ESXi 6.0 on Lenovo D20

[bdf0506]

I'm trying to get a Marvell RAID controller to work on ESXi 6.0 on my Lenovo D20. I installed the custom image of ESXi for Lenovo and all seems to work except for the RAID controllers.

I've seen articles like this one: VMware Front Experience: How to make your unsupported SATA AHCI Controller work with ESXi 5.5 and 6....

But, I'm still unable to get the controller to be recognized by ESXi as persistent storage. I am able to get it to use the hard drives when I connect them to the optical SATA ports on the motherboard, effectively bypassing all RAID, but it's not the end result. Any ideas?

0000:01:00.0 RAID bus controller Mass storage controller: Marvell Technology Group Ltd. MV64460/64461/64462 System Controller, Revision B

         Class 0104: 11ab:6485

[jjaxdrian]

Hey bdf0506,

I'm running into the same issue. Anyone figure it out?

I've tried suggested method (using Esxi-Customizer to inject sata-xahci‌ VIB file version 1.36) on VMware Front Experience website but no success so far.

Any suggestion would be appreciated.

Thanks,

[binro]

Marvell controllers like those used on the D20 are not Hardware RAID. They rely on a driver in windows to provide RAID and thus won't work as RAID in ESXi. Can you at least see just the individual disks when they are not part of the RAID?

[jjaxdrian]

Yeah, I've read about it and not pursuing raid feature. Just for available port for sata drivers at this point.

When I installed esxi 6.0, it doesn't show any available drives until i connect to sata ports....

[bdf0506]

‌Yea, I've hit the same behaviors. I won't see the drives listed at all in ESXi when in the RAID SATA slots, either as RAID or just as drives. I only see ESXi listing them once I move them to the Optical SATA ports.

Its still on the wish list, but at this point I have the drives running as non RAID. It is a bummer since I'm capped out at two HDD based on the available slots since the RAID SATA slots are effectively useless.