hard drives not showing up in ESXi Host

[jbattini]

We have two HP Proliant servers that we installed ESXi 6.5 on a regular 2.5" hard drive. After that was all done, we added an additional 3 hard drives to each server for internal storage however when we log into ESXi client, we're not able to detect the new hard drives. Is there a driver or something I need to do to the additional drives before I am able to detect them in ESXi. The server does support hot swapping so I've tried pulling out the drives and putting them back in but that doesn't do anything. When I try to do a rescan, it doesn't detect the additional hard drives.

This is particularly challenging since the server is off site at one of our other branches so it's difficult to troubleshoot with anybody on site since most of them are not overly technical. I've asked them to ship the hard drives back to my location so I can do some testing and I have another server identical to the two in our remote facility so I'll be able to go through troubleshooting steps. I figured I'd come to these forums for advice and before you ask, yes I am fairly new to the VMware world so my apologies if my explanations are not overly detailed.

Here are the specs for the server if needed:

HP ProLiant DL160 G6

2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5650 @ 2.67GHz

144GB RAM

[Gidrakos]

Silly question, and pardon my ignorance, but are the drives formatted?

Drives you order for servers won't come with anything on them, and first need to be initialized on the server itself and (most likely) want to be setup in some sort of array. If you simply plugged them in without setting anything up, they won't show up in vCenter.

[daphnissov]

Part or all of your problem is that your hardware does not support any ESXi version past 5.1 and so therefore drivers aren't guaranteed to work. If this is a production system, I'd strongly recommend you get off it and move to a supported configuration.

[jbattini]

Gidrakos you know what ... they're probably not. I just popped them in and hoped that they would get picked up. So yeah that's probably the issue, I remember going into the RAID set up utility for this server and seeing the drives so I figured I was good to go. So then the drives would need to be set up on the actual server, correct? Would this be through the server's RAID utility or would it be something I would do on the ESXi shell ?

[jbattini]

wait, that can't be right. I was able to install ESXi without any warnings but I checked the hard compatibility list for 6.5 and this server doesn't show up...

[Gidrakos]

You'll want to do it in the BIOS, but you may need to go into ESXi and mount the new configuration (I don't know how to do this), or reboot the machine so ESXi sees the new drive and mounts it automatically.

I added drives to my Dell servers in the past and if I remember correctly, once the raid config was setup, vCenter saw them no problem.

If your hardware wasn't at least fairly compatible, ESXi would either flat-out not run or run terribly.

[Finikiez]

What is your RAID controller?

When you added 3 hard drivers did you configured any RAID on them?

[daphnissov]

See image

[jbattini]

it is an HP SmartArray P410

I did not configure RAID on the drives.

[Finikiez]

Ok, configure any raid on them. RAID1 on two drives or each drive as a separate RAID0.

[MBreidenbach0]

Is the SmartArray RAID controller in HBA mode (that's a setting in HPSA config which disables RAID functionality) ? If not the physical drives need to be configured as RAID 0 logical drives (if you want to see single drives - and this will NOT provide any redundancy or fault tolerance)

If that system was configured using a HPE EXI iso there should be a CLI HPSA config utility. The exact name and location changed but it is somewhere below /opt

/opt/hp/hpssacli/bin/hpssacli ctrl all show config

/opt/hp/hpssacli/bin/hpssacli ctrl all show config detail

These commands can be used to report HP SA config. NOTE: exact path and utility name may be 'a bit' different.

[Dave_the_Wave]

Isn't it ideal to have ESXi on Smart Array acceleration (any 0, 1, 0+1, 5), and use "HBA" mode for a datastore like Freenas, which prefers non-raid?

[MBreidenbach0]

So far I've used HBA mode with vSAN (and ESXi installed on SD card).

For a ESXi host without vSAN I'd never use HBA mode.

If its not in HBA mode then just adding drives wouldn't do anything unless they are configured as new logical drive or added to an existing logical drive.

But in that case ssacli commands should 'see' them.