SATA Drives disappear when installing ESXi 5.0

[SGiff]

I have run into a problem when upgrading an Intel server (SR2600URLX) currently running esxi4.1 to esxi5.0. The system is currently running esxi4.1 with SATA drives attached to the embedded LSI1078IR SAS/SATA RAID controller. This RAID controller is essentially the same as an MPT Fusion card on the HCL (same PCI VID:DID).

When I boot the esxi5.0 install CD, none of the SATA drives are found so the installation cannot proceed. In debugging this I've made some discoveries that I wanted to share.

I have determined that if I remove all the SATA drives and install a single SAS drive the installation works just fine.

I've also found that if I combine two SATA drives into a mirrored volume through the LSI RAID configuration utility, esxi50 will install fine.

After booting the new esxi5.0 install (on the mirrored SATA drives) everything appears to work fine. However, if I add an additional single SATA drive to the system, the new drive will not be found under the storage adapter.

Logged into the esxi server:

fdisk -l doesn't show any drives.

vmkernel.log does show the discovery of the three SATA drives, shows the successfull registering of the mirrored pair volume and then shows the following error when trying to add the individual SATA drive:

　

2011-09-22T10:51:25.833Z cpu0:2659)VMWARE SCSI Id: Id for vmhba1:C0:T2:L0 [This is the single SATA drive]

0x50 0x00 0xc5 0x00 0x1a 0x7c 0xfd 0x20 0x53 0x54 0x33 0x35 0x30 0x30

2011-09-22T10:51:26.195Z cpu2:2684)<4>mptbase: ioc0: WARNING - IOC is in FAULT state (2650h)!!!

2011-09-22T10:51:26.195Z cpu2:2684)<4>mptbase: ioc0: WARNING - Issuing HardReset from mpt_fault_reset_work!!

2011-09-22T10:51:26.195Z cpu2:2684)<6>mptbase: ioc0: Initiating recovery

2011-09-22T10:51:26.195Z cpu2:2684)<4>mptbase: ioc0: WARNING - IOC is in FAULT state!!!

2011-09-22T10:51:26.195Z cpu2:2684)<4>mptbase: ioc0: WARNING - FAULT code = 2650h

　

Looks like the esx doesn't like the status coming from the drive. After checking the HCL and reading kb article 2005099, I'm hoping this is a bug and not a feature drop since the kb article states that SATA drives are supported behind approved RAID controllers.

I've attached the whole vmkernel.log file hoping that someone from vmware/LSI can use the info to fix this.