Rookie unable to get HP storageworks MSA60 to be seen

[cosonic]

Hi,

I've installed ESXi 5 on a HP DL380 G5 that has a Storageworks MSA60 with 9 300gb sas drives directly connected to it via a smart array P800 controller. Using Vsphere 5.1 I can see the P800 controller but nothing connected to it though I can see the internal drive on the DL380 connected through another controller. I'm not sure if its the Storageworks thats not compatable or someting else.

Any help greatly appreaciated as i'm on a steep learning curve.

Regards

[admin]

I dont see MSA 60 listed as per the below link. http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php?action=base&deviceCategory=san

[ElevenB2003]

Not supported by vSphere.  You could use a linux box or Windows in front of the MSA and serve up an NFS or CIFS share and add it as a datastore to your hosts but I don't know what kind of performance hit that would cause.  However, you would be able to use the MSA60 as a storage target for your vSphere environment.

[Josh26 · Accepted solution]

The MSA60 is literally an external disk enclosure. VMware doesn't need to support it. By this I mean, if you were to install Windows, you don't see the MSA60 in your device manager, it doesn't take any sort of driver. You would see the P800 RAID card, and some logical disks connected to it. Imagine opening up a server, running your internal SAS cable through a hole in the back and hanging your disks outside the server. That's pretty much the MSA60.

The P800 IS supported by VMware, so this configuration should work. However, what you don't have within VMware is any interface to actually create a RAID array. And without that, ESXi just sees it as an empty controller. Your server, being a very old G5, won't have the Intelligent Provisioning software modern systems use to get around this problem either. What you should therefore do is:

Download a copy of the HP SmartStart CD

Boot to said CD

Access the Array Controller Utility from there

Create some RAID arrays, and then one or more logical disks. Keep them under 2TB. Even though ESXi 5.1 supports larger, I wouldn't be confident your older hardware would work well with it.

Reboot to ESXi, you should be able to create a datastore.

[Josh26]

ElevenB2003 wrote:

Not supported by vSphere.  You could use a linux box or Windows in front of the MSA and serve up an NFS or CIFS share and add it as a datastore to your hosts but I don't know what kind of performance hit that would cause.  However, you would be able to use the MSA60 as a storage target for your vSphere environment.

CIFS shares cannot be used as datastores.

[cosonic]

Thanks for all your help, creating the smaller arrays and then logical drives with the smartstart cd worked a treat. Many thanks to you all. Now onto creating the virtual machines....