esxi 4.0 installable and apple xserve raid

[mchiu]

hi, i'm new to virtualization and am testing for our department. we have a dell poweredge 2950 connected via a qlogic sanbox 1400 to 2 apple xserve raid chassis. for those not familiar with the xserve raids, they're basically two raid arrays per chassis controlled by two separate controllers. one controller handles the left side of the chassis (disks 1-7) and the other handles the right side (disks 8-14). the raid admin tools provided by apple allow you to take one side of a chassis and "slice" it into equal parts . what we've done is taken each side (seven 500gb drives per side formatted raid 5 w/one hot spare for a total of 2.27tb of usable space per side) and sliced it into two 1.14tb luns to avoid hitting esxi's 2tb lun size limit. so we have 4 fibre cables coming into the sanbox from the 2 xraid chassis and 1 fibre cable coming into the sanbox from the poweredge. the problem is that when i try to add storage from the vsphere client configuration tab, i can only see the first lun of each "half-chassis" effectively cutting my storage capacity in half (i see lun 0 for each connection but nothing else). i've spent the past few days looking at all the settings and configuration options that esxi 4 provides but my newbie brain can't seem to make a connection between the settings and my problem. if anyone has any suggestions or has experienced the same issues, any assistance or discussions would be greatly appreciated. thanks in advance.

marcus

[hslcit]

I'm running into the same problem here. I'm using a Qlogic QLE2460 connected to one half of an xserve raid (via a switch). The array is sliced as well to avoid the 2TB limit that ESX has.

If I boot up to a linux live cd I can see all the LUNs without any problem. It appears to be a specific ESX issue. I've had no luck with ESX or ESXi. An ESX 3.5 host can see all three LUNs without problem so it appears to be a problem introduced in 4.0

[mchiu]

i've been working with dell on this issue for the past week or so without any luck. our controller is also a qlogic (qle2462), and we can also see all luns in esxi3.5.

if we come up with anything i'll be sure to post it.

===========================================

Marcus Chiu

Technical Administrator - Dept of Geography

San Diego State University

San Diego CA 92182-4493

O: 619-594-8618

F: 619-594-8647

mchiu@mail.sdsu.edu

http://geography.sdsu.edu

===========================================

[jpspgd]

I'm in the same boat with ESXi v4.0. I can only see the first slice of any of the FC controllers on our Apple XServe RAID units. I haven't tried ESXi v3.5 yet.

FWIW, our Apple XServe RAID slices come up just fine in full-blown ESX 4.0/vSphere. I'm using the same HBA (LP982) in ESX and ESXi, but different FC switches (QLogic 5600 series with ESX and Emulex/Vixel 375 with ESXi).

[mchiu]

thanks for the update jpspgd, if you ever get a chance to flip the fc switches (qlogic with esxi and emulex with esx) i'd be interested in the result.

i tried the most recent version of esxi yesterday (v4.0, build 171294), same result.

[jpspgd]

Unfortunately, I doubt I'll be able to swap FC switches any time soon. The Emulex/Vixel switch is in our off-site/backup datacenter and it always gets hand-me-down hardware. If I get a chance to bring up ESXi in our primary datacenter on the QLogic fabric, I'll be sure to post back.

[randelreiss]

Been a year since this thread was started and there doesn't seem to be any responses from VMware on this.

We just tried ESXi 4.1 hot off the presses and the problem persists. ESXi 4.1 via VSphere Client 4.1 will still not show any Apple XServe RAID LUNs past LUN 0.

I kknow VMware's party line of "Data Storage vendors need to be compatible with us, not vice versa." Except in this case, the Apple XServe-RAID WAS compatible with ESX(i) 3.5 and an engineering change at VMware broke that compatibility starting w/4.0. Apple certainly can't be expected to recertify to VMwares schedule. And backwards compatibility is not a luxurious feature when we're deploying out substancially datacenters with lots'o systems integration going on, come on guys.

[bcarb]

Was this ever solved? This post http://communities.vmware.com/click.jspa?searchID=9480233&objectType=2&objectID=1647970 suggests something about non-unique NAA IDs, but I'm not sure how you could change them in xserveRAID.

[DSTAVERT]

Have you checked with Apple support. Unless the device is on the Hardware Compatibility list I wouldn't count on  this being a good production quality candidate.

[tom1gozzi]

Hi

My troubles seems to be same with the internal RAID pro card of my Xserve Apple. (last generation 2009)

So, your post dates from 2010 to 2011.

Here i am in 2016, ESXi version 6.0.

Does anyone tried to use these Apples hardwarewith success?