AHCI and Hotswap

[KJDzikowicz]

I was wondering if anyone used hotswap with an AHCI onboard Sata controller?

I have a GF8200 in AHCI mode and i would like to be able to live plug a drive in to do backups, then remove it afterwards without rebooting.

Normally i know AHCI supports this but i dont know how ESXi would handle it.

Anyone that knows anything about this please let me know if its safe or not before i try.

Thank You.

[wila]

Hi,

Umm to be honest I'm not even sure if your controller/chipset is supported at all.

The Nvidia GF8200 doesn't appear to be listed on the HCL

Have you tested it to work with ESXi?

--
Wil
_____________________________________________________
VI-Toolkit & scripts wiki at http://www.vi-toolkit.com

Contributing author at blog www.planetvm.net

Twitter: @wilva

[AndreTheGiant · Accepted solution]

As written in the previous post, first check in HCL.

Then you can have two type of hot-swap:

• you remove and replace a disk on a hardware RAID volume: in this case VMware see only the volume, and this will work without problem if your controller can handle this case

• you remove a disk that is a VMware dastore... this can create some issue....

This last type of hot-swap can work? Yes. But you have to do manually: power-off all VM and remove from the inventory, then remove the disk and rescan your storage adapter.

Is it safe? Not so much, if you forget to power-off the VM before remove the datastore, then you can have trouble.

Andre

[KJDzikowicz]

Wila - It is not on the official ESXi HCL. It is however on the WhiteBox HCL and works perfectly with the oem.tgz file that includes it. It only works in AHCI mode and quite a few people other than myself have had good results.

Andre - My plan was to hot add a drive. Load the datastore off of it. Add the VMDK to the VM. Perform the backup I need. Unmount the VMDK. Unmount the datastore. And remove the drive and store for safekeeping.

If anyone else has any suggestions or experience to share, it would be appreciated.

Thanks for the reply.