Dell T620 Supported Raid Controller with ESXI VSphere Essentials 6

[amccallMBM]

Hello,

I'm hoping someone can help me out,  I've recently migrated from hyperV to ESXI VSphere Essentials 6 and the raid controller we have in our server does not properly work with ESXI (Dell PERC H710P) and we would like to upgrade to a supported card that will still work with our backplane, so it needs to be another dell PERC.  I'm looking at cards like the H730 and & H740 but I'm unsure if they are supported properly with ESXI.  The H710 card would work fine for the most part but randomly the read and write times would increase from milliseconds to thousands of seconds causing our VMs to crash or freeze. 

[daphnissov]

You can view storage controller compatibility here:  VMware Compatibility Guide - System Search

[a_p_]

Just a quick question. Did you already check whether the controller's write-back-cache/battery is healthy?

Issues like what you describe may be caused by e.g. a bad battery, which causes the controller to operate in write-through mode rather than write-back mode.

André

[amccallMBM]

I could possibly replace the battery on the H710P I have currently.  The reason I think it's dying is that it's losing the VDs created from within the raid controller before it makes it into ESXI now.  However, when I run a Dell Diagnostics, the battery health checks OK.

[IRIX201110141]

The Perc 710 is a supportet controller within a T620 and well supportet under ESXi. Check Dell PowerEdge RAID Controller (PERC) | Dell

We are a Dell shop and have dozens from these Controllers.

For it looks like that you have diabled the WriteCache for the vDisk/Volume in the PERC or the Battery is dead and the Controller switches automaticly to WriteTrough which is dead slow if you havend SSDs.

You should "download" the Log from the Controller to check whats in. What we have seen one was a dying Disk within a RaidGroup which brings down the complete vDisk. All the re-reads/Media Errors where visible within the log file. We open a #SR and Dell sends a new disk and problem was solved.

Regards

Joerg

[amccallMBM]

Humm, I'll have to double check the created VD, I'm sure WriteCache is enabled. I never disable that. I ended up replacing all of the drives with Seagate EXOS Enterprise drives as a safety measure since we were running on old 500gb drives anyway.  The server is out of warranty so no creating a SR from Dell as their costs are extremely high. So a dying drive is out of the question since it was doing it before the 500GB drives were removed, and still continued to display the same behavior with new drives...several new drives

We were getting HWC2003 which is a backplane A or B cable issue.  Very vague error and not much on the web about a fix.  I replaced the backplane and the backplane cables at the request of my boss.  That did not fix the issue so that left the raid controller being the only culprit left in the chain to replace.