ESXi 6.5 U3 Doesn't Display Locally Attached Storage Devices

[TopHatProductio]

Coming hot off the heels of the previous issue, I now have yet another one to attend to. I have the following drives sitting in the DL580 G7's front bays:

• 1x HP 518216-002 146GB HDD
• 1x Western Digital WD Blue 3D NAND 500GB SATA SSD
• 4x HP 507127-B21 300GB HDDs
• 1x 500GB Seagate Video ST500VT003 HDD

But only the HP 518216-002 and one of the HP 507127-B21's seem to have been detected by ESXi. However, if I look in iLO 3 (HP remote management), all of the drives show up. The SSD shows up as faulty, which means that it is possibly incompatible with my server. I can deal with the SSD issue later. My primary concern is that most of my spinning disks aren't detected in ESXi, even though iLO 3 shows them as being fault-free. Do I simply need to initialise the drives first, or am I missing something here? I apologise if this is a stupid question. Any assistance would be appreciated.

P.S. I found something that looks similar to what I'm encountering, but I'm not sure if it's the same situation.

• Re: hard drives not showing up in ESXi Host

Message was edited by: TopHat Productions115

[scott28tt]

What controllers are they hanging off?

Any sort of RAID configurations?

And are you talking about the ESXi installer, or that you are already installed but the drives don’t appear when you are trying to create datastores post-installation?

[TopHatProductio]

Thank you for replying. I will do my best to answer your questions:

1. The controller that the drives are attached to is one(s) that came with the DL580 G7, for the 8 front-facing drive bays. Not an external one(s), to clear things up.
2. No RAID in use here - just a bunch of individual drives in this case.
3. ESXi is installed to one of the internal drives (that were detected). The drives don’t appear when I go to create datastores post-installation.

[a_p_ · Accepted solution]

No RAID in use here - just a bunch of individual drives in this case.

How are the drives configured in the ACU (Array Configuration Utility), or ORCA (Option ROM Configuration of Arrays), i.e. on the RAID controller? Are all drives configured as JBOD's?

Unconfigured drives may not be presented to the operating system.

André

[TopHatProductio]

I'm getting ready to reinstall ESXi 6.5 U3, since HPE's Smart Array assumed I was gonna 'RAID all da things' and lose over half my storage to sub-optimally configured RAID arrays that it made (one of which was in perpetual recovery and included an unsupported SSD). Had to manually configure each drive as a logical volume with RAID 0 fault tolerance, treating each drive as its own virtual array of one disk. I ended up RAIDing all the things anyway, by that logic. I'll post pictures of the process in a few minutes. The blue background for the array config tool was surprisingly pleasant for the brief moments I used it.

[TopHatProductio]

Here are the photos I promised, so that newcomers won't be as confused if they go the same path I did:

• https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/702144829890494578/748999067794800772/20200828_153734.jpg
• https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/702144829890494578/748999068558032946/20200828_153804.jpg
• https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/702144829890494578/748999069531242606/20200828_153843.jpg
• https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/702144829890494578/748999070332485752/20200828_153912.jpg​

If anyone has any questions about the photos, please feel free to ask :smileygrin: Gotta keep moving...

[IRIX201110141]

The P410i is well supportet by ESXi 6.x.

If you would like to present single Disks rather an a Group you have to create multiple RAID0. I suggest to create a RAID5 of your 4 equal disks.

Regards,
Joerg