ESXi5 u1 loosing local storage temporary (During maintenance)

[KasperPedersen]

Hi.

We need to upgrade our local SAS RAID system firmwares on 2/2 RAID controllers and both controllers needs to be shut down during this firmware upgrade. Our ESXi 5.0 Update 1 is running for the same local storage and will be offline during this firmware process.

We have moved our virtual servers away from this SAS RAID to another storage, but my question is will my ESXi still work if I will leave them on while shutting down my controllers?

[Groundbeef79]

What I've done when faced with a similar situation is to vmotion everything to a new host, shut that host down, then do the firmware upgrade.  It sounds to me like you just have the one host though.  If the host loses connection to local storage where ESXi resides, I don't think it would like that very much.  If what you're saying is you cannot bring that host down, you're just going to have to plan for some downtime - say early on a Sunday.  Typical maintenance window-type stuff.  I hope you have good backups of everything.

[jfrappier]

If ESXi is installed on a drive and those drives are offline (because in this case the controllers are offline) then ESXi will no longer be running and the VMs will no longer be running.