I am building a POC lab using a C7000 chassis full of blades and with local storage.
I want to leverage the local storage via the vSAN product.
I have installed the USB sticks in the servers and have successfully deployed ESXi 5.5u1 to each server and carved the local drives into a RAID0 (pass-through isn't available on the RAID controller installed).
I then created two RAID 0 drives on the media.
1 drive is 22Gb
1 drive is 222Gb the remainder of the space.
I have tagged the 22Gb drive as SSD, and the vCenter clients all show this as an SSD drive.
I set up all the vSAN networks and requirements, then I go to set up the first disk group, and this is when it stops.
When go to configure a disk group on a host, i am asked to select 1 SSD and select one non-SSD drive, and the screen shows the non-SSD drive, but the list of SSD drives is empty.
I have rebooted and even rebuild the hosts RAID volumes from the ground up.
I also have made sure that NO VMFS partition has been placed on it.
What is wrong?
I have noticed one anomaly...
When I go to "detach" the SSD drive so that I can free the path ownership (for diagnostic reasons) I notice that I cannot.
It fails saying that there is a Diagnostic partition on this disk, so it refuses.
I believe this might be the problem, so, how to I prevent this volume from being touched?
