DL320 G5P + ESXi 3.5

[Questions]

I have read some posts, and spoke with vmware support... I've read one post here with someone mentioning they got esxi to install, however, after installed, an incompatability with the raid was the issue. With my DL 320 , I can't even get to that point, I can't even get it to install.... it just loads, then says its not in the HCL... I would even be fine with me using 1 HD until i get a raid card thats in the HCL... can someone tell me how to get it to at least even install??

Much appreciated

:smileygrin:

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Welcome to the VMware Community forums. What sort of storage controller does your server have? Does the install stop with a message about not being able to find a support device to write the image to?

[Questions]

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the very quick response.

It has an Intel ICH9R I believe...

Here is a post you previously helped out on, with similar issue:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/154295;jsessionid=F5442B9129569C3118B485157ADCB443?tstart=0&sta...

and this post shows about as far as I can see someone getting:

http://communities.vmware.com/thread/172004

I'm not sure if the user that had successfully got it to install but without raid card support, used the noacpi method or not?

Any help is greatly appreciated, as I am wasting a quad core server with 16gb of ram here

[Dave_Mishchenko]

What's the exact error you get? If it's just about not finding a supported device, then I would change the BIOS mode for the SATA controller. You won't get it to work with you have drives in a RAID array with the ICH9R as the driver with ESXi doesn't support it. Are you able to get the PCI ids for the ICH9R and then compare it to this list - http://www.vm-help.com/esx/esx3i/Hardware_support.php. There a link on that page on how to use the ESXi boot CD to find the PCI IDs.

[Texiwill]

Hello,

Moved to ESXi forum.

Best regards,

Edward L. Haletky

VMware Communities User Moderator

====

Author of the book 'VMWare ESX Server in the Enterprise: Planning and Securing Virtualization Servers', Copyright 2008 Pearson Education.

CIO Virtualization Blog: http://www.cio.com/blog/index/topic/168354

As well as the Virtualization Wiki at http://www.astroarch.com/wiki/index.php/Virtualization

[Questions]

Hey Dave,

I disabled the raid card... and the option to install became available... So I installed on one hard drive and currently its working fine, I even downloaded my vmtools and connected to it... My question is.. Im seeing 2 datastores.... does this mean I can spam VM's across both datastores? I just have zero redundancy?

Will this work fully functional?

[Dave_Mishchenko]

If you have for example 2 500 GB drives and you have to create a 800 GB VMDK file for a VM you could

1) delete your second datastore

2) bring up the properties of the 1st datastore and then add an extent (see image).

This would allow you to span both drives as a single datastore, but a single disk failure could have a significant impact and if a VM has data on both drives then it would be lost.. I would stick with 2 seperate datastores, but it will work if you need it. You don't get stripping from this, ESXi will just use the space as it needs it and not optimize IO in any way between the drives.