IBM BladeCenterS HS22V 7871 and LSI1064E

[snantel]

Wondering what the community will said about this.

It's a catastrophic news for all the customer that run IBM BladeCenterS with HS22 blade.

I recently upgraded to ESXi 5 and get two crashes (Host losing access to storage.)

After contacting VMWARE...

<<

Support Request #12150692803, regarding Storage connectivity issues on your ESXi 5.0 hosts. Based on our last communication,  the LSI 1064E controller is not supported and is incompatible on ESXi 5.0 hosts.

>>

So I called IBM and they are now pissed off and they are now investigated this information. IBM said they are not authorized anymore to publish drivers for VMWare. And VMWare decided to drop the support for IBM ???

Looks like a war from my point of view between IBM and VMWARE.

But who paid for that ? US the customers...

[snantel]

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1843718#1843718

Found this link, gonna try this.

[snantel]

I need to say I didn't get the problem on the HS22V 7871 yet...

Only on the HS22 7870.

[cdc1]

All I can offer is this:

1. At the risk of playing a bit of devil's advocate here ... It's more of a "catastrophic" issue for customers running any hardware with an LSI1064E-based storage controller in the host.  That controller is at least 5 years old now, as far as I know.  Most companies refresh their hardware every 3 years, with some refreshing every 5 years (and some trying not to refresh until the hardware itself dies).  So, it's not much of a surprise to me to see that it's no longer officially supported.

2. IBM offers an IBM-customized ISO image for ESXi 5.0 at the following URL.  It includes drivers for IBM-provided hardware that may not be in the VMware-provided image, as well as hooks into the extra hardware sensor data specific to the IBM hardware.  Although I cannot guarantee that it will have a driver for your specific controller, it might be worth a shot to give it a try, if you haven't already.

http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/x/os/vmware/esxi/

[snantel]

First thanks for the info,

Maybe you'r right and IBM still selling us old hardware in brand new server but the fact is, there is no better card fitting on these blades (and the only one), so we have absolutely no work around.

43W4068 SAS Connectivity Card (CIOv) for IBM BladeCenter

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0701.html