ESXi 3.5 Rel 3 - very nice .... so far

[dmxlou]

Hello.

Question : Now tha tI have this up and running (I want to rebuild it), but I need a bootable Raid card. I have a 3Ware 9650 2

channel that I will be avail to me today to try, but my initial searches tell me its not

supported. May have to buy a different card, anyone have any

suggestions?

Background : Installed ESXiRel3 onto a SuperMicro PDSBM-LN2+ based system. Quad Core CPU, 4GB RAM on board SATA., 2 500GB 7200RPM SATA-II drives. Box was used as Centos 5.2 server utilizing on board Intel ICHR7 Raid (Adaptec mode) and it worked fine, but why run Server ontop of Linux when ESXi is available.

So far, it works great. I plan on adding 4 GB more of RAM to box and will run about 6 VM's on it for dev testing. May consider building another pair of boxes on ESXi for production.

Also connected to my NFS (Centos 5.1) server just fine and created and loaded a VM from it.

Need to check out some of the backup scripts I have seen to backup VM's from local storage to NFS storage.

Cheers!

- Lou

[dtalk]

The 9650SE-2 is supported, but is not bootable. I got around that by running the hypervisor on a USB key and using the 9650SE for the datastore. 3Ware's directions work perfectly (http://www.3ware.com/kb/Article.aspx?id=15416).

You can just run the hypervisor using a disk on the onboard controller, of course, but I thought it made little sense to have storage redundancy for the VMs and not the hypervisor. I figure a USB key is probably far more reliable than a hard disk, so I'm ok with that alternative.

Cheers ... -d

[dmxlou]

Thanks.

I ordered a 4GB flash hard drive w/IDE interface and will use it and follow procedure for the3ware driver/card.

Is there a decent 3rd party bootable raid that supports SATA drives?

- Lou

[J0nF]

There are unsupported but working SATA raid cards and you can find a number of them on VM-Help[/url]. VM-help has been an invaluable resource for me along with these forums in my research to get myself up and running with ESXi.

[dmxlou]

Just wanted to follow up. I was not able to use the Transcend Flash IDE 1GB drive, so I reverted to using the USB memory stick method and it worked. (I also ordered a SATA Flash drive to try out).

Once booted, I connect using VI Client and noticed that it did see the Datastore even though I had not yet copied the oem.tgz file containing the drive from 3Warer for the 3Ware 9650SE-2LP to the designated folder. I

I added the driver and system still working fine. Still wondering if perhaps Update3 does include 3Ware support for storage. Need to stuff usb drive inside case using unused USB headers.

Next up will be trying to boot of a Flash SATA drive.....

• Lou

[dtalk]

Interesting ... I don't recall the 9650 being recognized at all before I loaded the driver.

In any case, the critical thing is to make sure reporting works. The 3Ware-supplied driver will communicate with vmkernel, and thus produce log messages which you can monitor. This is the only way you'll know if a drive fails. SNMP support in this driver would be fabulous, but that appears to not be present in the ESXi version. All you get is syslog; watch for messages referring to "AEN".

The driver is very terse, and there does not appear to be any way to query it. It won't give you status, even at boot, unless something is wrong (*). Ergo, it's very important to not miss a message. This is the reason that I chose serial port logging to another host; it was the only way I could be confident that my log watcher would receive every message, including those uttered at bootup time.

Note that you can also view vmkernel messages via the web interface, but that's probably not useful for health monitoring.

(*) or unless you've started a verify, which I sometimes do when I reboot, just to confirm that messages are being delivered and noticed.

[VMwareQuestionG]

Hello, there, this posting is helpful. Thank you. However, can I ask two more questions specifically?

1) Will this PDSBM-LN2+ board will work with VMware ESX 3i?

2) This board is Intel ICH7R built-in controller, and will this support 4 x 1.5TB drive?

Yes, I should ask Supermicro, but I figure out that I'm asking this vmware-related, and you may also know the 2nd question. Please help, and thank you.

Regards!

VMwareQuestionGuy

[Dave_Mishchenko]

The ESXi ICH driver doesn't support RAID and you'll either have to modify oem.tgz or use an IDE install method for ICH7 controllers - see www.vm-help.com.

[VMwareQuestionG]

Thank you, dear Dave.

Just another question that will ICH controller supports / detects 4 x Seagate 1.5TB drive = 6TB? I heard many people saying about yes or no. Do you know if Intel ICH7 can do that? Thank you....!!!!

[Dave_Mishchenko]

The ICH driver will only show 4 individual drives. It won't support or display the RAID array.

[VMwareQuestionG]

Thank you, Dave. Have a nice afternoon...!!!