ESX4, Intel ModularServer & Promise Storage

[phmule]

HI Together.

Im using esx4 on a Intel Modular Server. I have attached an Promise Vtrack e310sD (Its a sas raid with dual raid controller)

I have a few question:

1. Has somebody experienced why it's not possible to work with Passthrough on the Modular server?

2. I created a lun with 3,5TB on the Promise Raid and assigned it with Lun10. I can see the lun on the esx hba, but when i try to add a storage which lies on the promise, i get an error: Failed to get disk partition information.

I think, there is no partition information, because the lun has never seen a host before

Has somebody any idea?

regards

Philipp

[kaschool]

Philipp

Can you try creating a LUN on the Vtrak less than 2TB and see if that mounts ok? I believe there is a 2TB limit in VMFS. You can overcome this however using LUN bridging.

Not sure what you mean with regards to pass through on the Modular Server? Effectively the SAS on the Modular Server does pass through the storage controller to the external X4 SAS port. By this I mean it does not go through the RAID stack to communicate with the external attached devices. But please clarify exactly what you are looking for?

Thanks

[tshfloyd]

Hi..

Yes, at the moment my 1TB LUN is Initializing, then i will test it.

How does LUN Bridging works?

It's because, i need one volume which is 12-16TB, when i have to split it, into 6-8 LUNs and this for 10-20 VM's its terrible to manage the luns...

With passthrough, i mean the funktion in esx under Configuration->Hardware->Advanced Settings "VMDirectPath"

Regards

Philipp

[kaschool]

Sorry i don't have any experience with LUN bridging - i'm sure some searches will help with guides etc.

Remember that you can have SCSI reservation issues if you have too many virtual machines on a single LUN. I think 4-6 is advisable but not 100% sure what the recommend density is.

I would assume VMDirectPath is supported on the Modular Server MFSYS25. you would need compute modules MFS5520VI as these have the Nehalem and Westmere based CPUs which are required for direct path. I think it is a setting in the BIOS, so please go in and check you have this enabled. And also look at the guides posted here:

http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-11089

[DSTAVERT]

You can increase the datastore size using Extents.

http://pubs.vmware.com/vsp40u1_e/wwhelp/wwhimpl/js/html/wwhelp.htm#href=server_config/t_increase_vmf...

If you need a very large storage volume for a particular VM and your hardware does support VT-d then you can take advantage of VMDirectPath I/O. VMDirectPath would need a dedicated and supported HBA and that would be passed through to the Virtual Machine.

[tshfloyd]

Hi.

Ok Thanks.

I have read that its possible to work with raw device mapping.

But i can't find much information to create rdm with vmkfstools - with vsphere client it's no tpossible to create a rdm with direct attached sas storage.

Has someone any information?

Regards

Philipp