Hi there. Happy for this to be moved to a more appropirate board if necessary
My system
IBM x3650 M4 server with ServeRAID M5110e SAS/SATA controller on board working fine. I have eSXI 6.7 in use booting off a USB in the hypervisor slot. I have a 16 slot RAID bay and currently have 4 HDD configured in an array for VM use. This host and server and this is controlled by a vSPhere instance on a separate SFF PC on the network.
I would like to access the serveraid via a GUI and software much like the megaraid software that can be installed on windows server machines. However, i dont know how to configure the host (on the x3650) to allow the megaraid software to work. I do have a VM running windows server on the x3650 at the moment. I have found various VIB files that i have installed but ultimately, I found a post suggesting enabling passthrough of the raid controller on the host.
So i went to my vsphere instance and have reached the PCI devices page in the configuration where i can enable passthrough. The warning comes "it may cause boot errors". ESXI doesnt boot off the serveraid but i am worried what might happen.
Will doing this allow me to install an instance of the megaraid windows software either on the server VM or a separate desktop PC so that i can configure RAID arrays in comfort.
The alternative is to go in to the loft where the server is and reboot the x3650, and use the webbos - i dont mind doing that but it is a bit of a pain when i might be able to do it in my office downstairs
Thanks
Heshan
In the meantime, i enabled passthrough of the LSI Megaraid device successfully to the host and added it to the installation of server 2019 VM that is on the x3650. Rebooted and it is now in the device manager.
I installed the Megaraid software from here
https://datacentersupport.lenovo.com/gb/en/downloads/ds501345
and it picks up the VM/server but doesnt pick up the storage controller instead choosing to use the VM's storage controller. Dont know where to go from here.
Heshan
I tried this -- ESXi 6.7 with an LSI 9260-8i installed -- and it is seen as a DataStore (in fact have 2 VMs there) -- one of them is Windows Server 2019. I flipped to PASSTHRU = ON and rebooted -- now that entire DataStore is not visible at all.
I want to install the MegaRAID System Manager on that 2019 server and access the GUI. I know the IP address of the ESXi host - but does not work.
I re-flipped the PASSTHRU and the DataStore is back but it corrupted my VMs that were there. None of them will start (or even re-import) from backup.
