ESXi 6.5 B120i (hpvsa) HP Microserver Gen8 Low performance

[migueltg]

I performed a clean install of ESXi 6.5 on HP Microserver Gen8 with provided HP image (VMware-ESXi-6.5.0-OS-Release-4564106-HPE-650.9.6.0.28-Nov2016). I have the datastore on a Raid 1 logical disk in b120i.

When I access to and from datastores over network through vSphere Client (6.0.0) is very slow ~20 Mbps. In virtual machines the performance has dropped significantly and the overall file copy is much slower.

I tried to install scsi-hpvsa-5.5.0-88 which gives good performance on ESXi 6.0 but ESXI 6.5 stopped recognizing my datastores.

Finally i Install again ESXI 6.0 with scsi-hpvsa-5.5.0-88 to get best stable enviroment.

What can be done to be able to have the advantages of ESXI 6.5 with a good performance on HP Microserver Gen8 and B120i?

Thanks

[segobi]

See my fix here:

NXHut - IT and Windows - News: Fix slow disk performance (vmw_ahci driver) in ESXi 6.5

I had the same problem.

[SamBGB]

Did segobi‌ suggestion work for you? I am finding ESXI quite unstable on the Microserver Gen8.

[Dopke139]

I've installed ESXi 6.5 on a gen8 Microserver but I'm having trouble getting it to recognise the RAID 1 volume I've created on the integrated B120i - instead all VMware sees is the 4x 3TB indivdual drives.

I've read that the B120i isn't true hardware RAID and that VMware doesn't like it and therefore need to purchase an additional RAID card like the P222?

How did you get it to recognise the RAID volume? Am I missing something? Appreciate any help you can give as I'm at a bit of a loss here!

Thanks!

Matt

[Spooled302]

The B120i isn't hardware RAID as it requires the OS to build and maintain the array to some degree.  I'm not exactly sure what responsibilities the OS has vs the controller but ESXi doesn't have that capability.  I purchased a P212 card and that works great for running RAID with ESXi.