New to ESXI need some advise, (Smart Array P400 & NIC issues)

[YKno]

Hi,

So i am relativly new to ESXI and would like some advise,

Im using a whitebox server with a p400 (yes after researching and troubleshooting I now regret using a p400 but at like £8 a go for a p400 card and the vast avalibilty of them i guess its worth the headaches to make it work.)

I found some custom vib by Alex-AT that forces the p400 to use the HPSA drivers so it can see raid array's over 2TB. if so what ESXI version have you been runing this on?

What are peoples thoughts on this any one used this before?

also im having a issue where on setup of my ESXI server it see all NIC's but only 1 will connect to a network no mater which port I plug in to only 1 works, so i have 2 onboard NICs and 2 NICs on a pci card, when I plug in to a port it says connected but when i set IP I cant browser to the server and the NIC's have a red link light instead of the usual green, (I know all of the NIC's work as i have used them before in other builds) is this a issue with ESXI or my motherboard as my thinking is its nto motherboard as surely if it was disabling the onboard NIC's when it detected a network card ESXI wouldnt see them,

[daphnissov]

My personal advice that would address both your storage controller and NIC woes would be to get some better hardware that was at least supported in the past so you don't have to deal with problems like these. I've been down the route of trying to beat whitebox servers into submission with ESXi and it's just not worth it. At least build a whitebox with components you know have functional drivers on the latest release, even if it's not supported.

[GTSREngineer]

Red lights mean you have a physical problem.  It is probably not the motherboard if it is happening on the NIC card also.   Make sure you have good patch cables and a good switch.

[YKno]

Should elabirate a bit more im not new to ESXI im new to building my own ha. and ye the p400 is supported up to version 5.5 but the issue is it cant see raid arrays over 2tb in esxi as it uses teh SCSI drivers not the HPSA ones but Ye i took your advise anyways and I ordered a p410 as that is supported up to version 6.0 and uses the HPSA drivers which is good enough for me as my company I work for uses ESXI 5.5 so thats what I will be using till they upgrade.

[YKno]

I thought about this more now and i think it might be a bandwidth Issues as my switch is fine its a gig switch no issue on any other machines in my rack and that motherboard in my whitebox server works fine I know that as I have used the 2 onbaord ports before in a old FreeNAS deployment I feel its the PCI card thats the issue i will remove the card and try again.