I have a second hand Dell PowerEdge R620. I installed 2 Sandisk 1TB SSD drives and used the Lifecycle controller to create a RAID 1 Virtual Disk made up of the two drives. I have a thumb drive with the Dell ESXi 6.5U3 on it. When I boot up that thumb drive to do the install, the disks that it shows available are the *member* disks of my RAID 1, not the virtual disk created by those two drives.
I'm dumbfounded. I didn't even know that was possible. The Dell PowerEdge R620 has the PERC S110 (v3.0.0-0139) RAID controller. I thought that the RAID controller presented the virtual drive to the OS and that the OS was never supposed to be able to see the member drives of the RAID (by definition), unless through the RAID controlling/monitoring software.
Ultimately, this is stopping me from creating a fault-tolerant RAID 1 datastore for my ESXi server.
I hope someone can see a simple mistake in what I'm doing.
Here is a list of things I have tried to isolate the problem. Given that I find that (apparently, from my searches) no one else in the world has this problem, I must conclude the problem is me.
1. I have installed the Dell version of ESXi 6.5U3 on the internal SD cards. So I can get the server up and running, but when I go to the management web interface to add the datastore, it also shows the member drives of the RAID and not the VDisk that is created by the RAID. (*Ironically, the internal SD cards, only 2GB, are mirrored by the lifecycle controller. But I get the same results if I pull the SD card riser out and try to install straight to the RAID instead of the SSD's.). I'm including a screenshot of the individual drives that come up on the list when I try to create a datastore from within the Web GUI.
2. I have installed Windows Server on this hardware and it picked up the PERC S110 and installed on the vdisk as expected. (I did have to put the Perc S110 driver for Windows Server on the install media and load it manually during setup. Before loading it, it did not see *any drives - as expected. After manually loading the driver, it saw the vdisk, again, as expected.)
3. I have tried using 3 drives and creating a RAID 5 vdisk, but I get the same results. It looks just like the screenshot I have included, only it lists all 3 member drives.
4. The firmware of the R620 is 2.9.0.
5. I have tried installing Dell ESXi version 7, same issue.
6. I have taken out the SSD's and put in conventional SATA drives of different brands and created the RAID. Still, the member drives show up instead of the vdisk.
7. I have tried the non-Dell version of ESXi.
I can't isolate if it's an ESXi problem or Dell problem. On one hand, the Dell RAID controller is letting the ESXi server see the member drives. On the other hand, the RAID controller seems to work perfectly when installing Windows Server.
Thanks in advance for any help.
-Terry
