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IngeniuM2
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3ware 9650SE - not supported in ESXi 6?

From what information I can gather, the RAID-card "3ware 9650SE" is not supported in ESXi 6.

Does anyone know if this is correct?

Does anyone know if it will be supported or if this card is obsolete for ESXi 6?

Thanks in advance

/Henric

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illvilja
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According to the VMware HCL, 3ware 9650SE has not been supported in anything newer than ESXi 5.1 U3

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IngeniuM2
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After having moved it to another PCIe-slot, the system managed to find it without any custom driver being installed. :smileysilly:

Sorry for the mistake!

Edit:

It appears I was too quick. The card gets identified in BIOS, but not within ESXi 6... Smiley Sad

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cbunks
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I run a 9650SE-16ML myself. I havent seen a driver posted on LSI's site, and I'm not really in the position to bring down my server to test an upgrade (Its remote and the motherboard doesnt have IPMI)

Were you able to install the driver from ESXi v5 and test it? I'm currently playing wait and see, running the latest 5.5. I'll keep an eye on this post though since it seems to be the first about the 9650 and ESXi 6

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illvilja
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According to the VMware HCL, 3ware 9650SE has not been supported in anything newer than ESXi 5.1 U3

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cbunks
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According to a blog post here: VMware Front Experience: VMware launches vSphere 6 - What's in ESXi 6.0 for free license and white b...

"One thing that I tested very early during the vSphere 6 beta phase was ESXi driver compatibility with earlier versions. The good news is that you can still install and use device drivers from ESXi 5.x with ESXi 6.0!"


I may try a nested install of ESXi 6 and load the vib I'm using from 5.5 (originally a build for 5.0 scsi-3w-9xxx_2.27.08.036-1OEM.500.0.0.472560)

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IngeniuM2
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I have installed that driver to see if ESXi 6.0 picks it up... and the driver gets installed just fine. However, the card just doesn´t seem to get recognized within the ESXi 6.0.

Any ideas on what to try next are very welcome. Smiley Happy

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cbunks
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Hi

can you please ssh into the host and paste the outputs here from the following commands:

1) ~ # lspci

we are looking for something like:

0000:03:00.0 Mass storage controller: 3ware 9650SE 3ware 9650SE [vmhba#] <- Good

00:03:00.0 Mass storage controller: 3ware Inc 9650SE SATA-II RAID PCIe <- Bad

and

2) ~ # esxcli software vib list

IngeniuM2
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cbunks

I had the driver uninstalled, so I re-installed it just now. And for the first time the Storage Adapter "3ware 9650SE" now shows up in the vSphere Client... Smiley Happy

But no devices show up on the controller... and I cannot seem to be able to locate them. Any suggestions?

View in the vSphere Client.jpg

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cbunks
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Ok so far so good. The vib is loaded and installed, and the 9650SE is found and mapped as a storage device, vmhba3. Please select the 9650SE from the Storage Adapters view in your screenshot, right click and select Rescan.

You should see any LUNs you had created previously. Also, you may need to reboot after the driver install, if you haven't already.

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IngeniuM2
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I already rebooted and rescanned before the last post.

With no success. Smiley Sad

In the picture above the 3ware 9650SE is listed as type "SCSI", but the other drivers are listed as "Block SCSI". Does that give any clue to a solution?

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cbunks
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My controller in 5.5 is also listed as "SCSI" so I don't think that is it. If you boot into the Bios of the card, are you able to see the LUNs you have created?

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IngeniuM2
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I could see the drives (all single drives) in BIOS, but not in ESXi 6.0.

I tried to delete the drives in the BIOS in order to recreate them as single drives again. And voila!! They are now all visible in ESXi 6.0. Smiley Happy

Good news for me, but perhaps bad news for you and everyone else that want to upgrade?

Note: The drives were initially created as single drives in my earlier version of ESXI 5.0.

cbunks >> Thank you for the help. Smiley Happy

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cbunks
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Well that's good news. I'm confident that a upgrade to 6.0 is possible. I'll be onsite with my server next month (weekend of 4/25) and give it a test upgrade and post back here with results. I'll also test tw_cli for those of us that use it.

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zoran4afc
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Take a look at this post:

Re: VMWare Do not recognize this controller: LSI/3Ware 9650SE-4LPML

You should probably forget about 3ware 9650 in esxi host.

I tried hard to get it work in esx 5.5, but no use of it. Even if it apparently works, it is not reliable (see the post).

You can build a Linux iSCSI SAN based on 9650, it works very good, but it doesn't support VAAI - so thin provisioned disks will be more than 50% slower than thick.

See:

Disappointing performance of Storage vMotion thin provisioned VM, iSCSI SAN, 10Gb LAN (Open-e DSS v7...

One more catch: having larger capacity array, in my case 8 * 4GB RAID6, you have to disable the controller's periodic array autoverification, because it will never complete, it will just restart every 24 hours, making ESXi access to array slow (latency will raise to 100ms).

IngeniuM2
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zoran4afc

I will try to do some simple data-storaging on the disks connected to my 9650-card in the coming month. It will probably not be enough of "testing" in order to clear the RAID-card as a reliable card for ESXi 6.0, though.

And you are absolutely correct on the autoverification-thing. I used to have a 10 drive RAID 6 that would seem to verify all the time. Smiley Happy

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jsahn
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Hey,

In response to ESXi 6 + 3ware 9650SE

Re: VMWare Do not recognize this controller: LSI/3Ware 9650SE-4LPML

for the 3ware 9650SE-12ML (what I use)

ss+(2015-04-18+at+12.19.35).png

I used the same steps as for loading the 5.0u1 drivers onto 5.5 and I even used the same ESXi-Customizer (VMware Front Experience: ESXi-Customizer).

To elaborate a little bit on what I did was:

Download the zips mentioned in the post, extract them, inject the vib files into the ISO. Try just installing the vibs via the CLI but I don't know the proper commands to do so.

cbunks
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Thats great news jsahn, thank you for your post. I'll be attempting an upgrade later next week.

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CrazyC7
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I would like to add to this discussion in that I DID get my 3ware 9650se-4lpml to work in ESXi 6.0.

I followed the instructions in this thread install from the command line:  Get the 3ware 9650SE working with ESXi 5.x | jermsmit.com - Jermal Smith

I used these 2 driver files:

aacraid-1.2.1.40709-2422670.zip - uploaded from the zip for install:  vmware-esxi-drivers-scsi-aacraid-600.6.2.1.40709.-1.0.6.2159203.x86_64.vib

esxi5u1_driver_LSI_3ware_96xx,zip - uploaded:  scsi-3w-9xxx-2.27.08.036-1OEM.500.0.0.472560.x86_64.vib

After installing the drivers and rebooting, the ESX host recognized the raid card and I was able to create datastores on both a Mirror Raid and a Single Drive connected to the card.  ESX does not seem to notice when pulling a drive from the Mirror array though.

If anyone figures out how to monitor the raid status, that would be awesome.

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JustinF
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I just upgraded to 6.0U2 from 5.1U2 and didn't have to do anything for my 9650SE to keep working.  I selected the upgrade option after booting the 6.0U2 ISO - I guess it kept the previous drivers loaded.

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kx14
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For me the 9650SE also works on 6.0U2. But did anybody get it working on ESXi 6.5?

I'm getting an error like:

VIB ... requires vmkapi_2_0_0_0, but the requirement cannotbe satisfied within the ImageProfile.

and

VIB ... requires com.vmware.driverAPI-9.2.0.0, but the requirement cannotbe satisfied within the ImageProfile.

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