Access SMB Storage using esxi host and manage with MS server 2008

[avaldes85]

Hi there, I know the subject line may be confusing, but I just didn't know how to explain what I need in the subject line in such a short sentence.

Anyways, I have a SMB storage device, a Promise VTrak M610P which is attached to a 1U HP server blade via dual Ultra 320 SCSI host interface channels. I cannot setup the VTrak as an NFS, the only way to access the logical drives is by connecting it to a server via the scsi channels and using the operating system to share the drive space as shared drives.

I would like to use a server blade with dual ultra 320 SCSI host interface channels and connect the VTrak to that server blade. Then, I'd like to install ESXI 5.5 hypervisor OS to that server blade. What I would like to know is if the ESXI operating system will recognize the logical drives and if I create a virtual machine with MS server 2008 and see if the virtual machine detects the logical drives, so that I can share the drives? I hope I'm making sense and if I'm not, please let me know what doesn't make sense I will do the best to explain it better.

Thank you

Andy

[vervoortjurgen]

so your storage is connected with SCSI controller?

if you install esx then you will see the storage and you can create a datastore on it or use RDM disk to a VM

some point you need to consider

1. is the blade support for ESXi

2. are the dual SCSI controller cards supported?

3. raid configuration on your Promise VTrak M610P

point 1 and 2 can be looked up on the vmware HCL list

point 3 can be solved by installing customized image from HP so you can use hp ACU CLI

or you can use ACU offline to configure your raid

unless you go for pass through then you dont need raid config

but the Promise VTrak M610P can be managed i think through ip console? so you can skip point 3.

hope this is an answer you looking for?

[avaldes85]

Hi Vervoort,

Thank you for the reply. So the storage unit is a Promise VTrak M610P which connects to a SCIS controller PCI card. The server is a Supermicro X7DAL-E.

Surprisingly, ESXI 5.5 works perfectly and recognizes the promise system, so I'm able to create a datastore based on the volume available in the storage device.

The problem I'm having now is that I want to use all that space and have a VM running MS server 2012 and do file sharing. When I attempt to edit the settings in the VM and add a new Hard Disk and specify the total space available which is more than 5TB, I get an error DiskCapControl value. I then specified the space to be 4TB and it seems to work. So is there a maximum amount of space to allocate in a hard disk? Is this a proper way to create a virtual machine to provide file sharing services?

Thank you in advance.

[vervoortjurgen]

hello

you are doing this through VI client?

do it on the web client instead to expand to 5 TB

see last part of this article

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=205828...

hope this helps

[avaldes85 · Accepted solution]

So as it turns out, there seems to be something wrong with vClient when Adding a Hard Disk (Virtual Disk) to a VM of size larger than 4TB. The article VMware KB: Value out of range error message when adding disks larger than 4TB in vSphere Client describes that if you come across this problem, to add the hard disk via vSphere CLI, Power CLI or vmkfstools. So this seems to be a known issue on vClient. What I ended up doing was using vClient, creating the hard disk, adding it to the VM (size of hard disk is 5.45TB) and when I would get the error about the DiskCapControl out of range, I would just click OK and then finalizing the creating of the hard disk on the VM. Once the process is done, I selected the VM and noticed that it did in fact added a new hard disk of size 5.45TB even though it complained about it. I fired up the VM with windows server 2008 R2 installed and was able to create a new drive on windows and set it up as a shared drive on the network. Seems like vClient needs to be updated by VMware and fix this bug, if it is a bug which I think so. Thank you for the help vervoort!