HP xw8600 set on mirror

[hppete]

Just got a new to me HP Workstation.

It had two sata drive in mirror raid configuration using the on board Intel Matrix Storage Manager.

I installed esxi 5 and it went fine.

However, I just noticed the raid status is now degraded.  I am assuming because esxi does not recognize the Intel based mirror?

Any way to do the install process differently so that that I can utilize the mirror?

[marcelo_soares]

You see it degraded on the Hardware Status from vSphere Client? Can you check on BIOS if it is really degraded?

[hppete]

hi thanks for the response. It shows degraded in bios. It was fine before installing esxi.

[marcelo_soares]

Don't think this was caused by the ESX. You can try removing/adding the problematic disk to check if RAID comes to life again.

[hppete]

ok I might try that. I thought i'd read in general that esx had problems installing on low end raid.

[marcelo_soares]

Usually there is no problem, but in some cases there are bugs (mainly related with specific controllers which have their driver upgrades as per VMware HCL) reported and corrected, but AFAIK none that could generate this behavior.

[hppete]

ok, I moved my virtual disks off this disk.  Went into bios, removed the mirror.  Restablished the mirror.

I get into esxi setup and it prompts which of the 2 disks do I want to install esxi.  It is as this point I would only expect to see my mirror volume, not the 2 disks seperately.  If I install to one of them, it degrades the raid, this is what I did last time.

Its like esxi doesn't recognize the mirror.

Any ideas?

[hppete]

i installed windows 2008 r2 on the mirror just as a test, and it went just fine.  downloaded the intel storage manager software and it recognized the mirror and said everything was just fine with the disks.

went back, broke the mirror, recreated it, tried to install esxi again, and still recoginizes it as 2 seperate drives.

[Vei · Accepted solution]

I know this is a few months old but I have a solution for you. I really like the xw8600s for 2 reasons, cheap second hand/refurb and have an 8-port sas/sata lsi raid card onboard.

All you have to do is plug the sata hard drives into the lsi ports instead of the intel sata ports. Then go into lsi bios, (ctrl+c) create your mirror and go. That's it. Esxi does not work with sata/software raid.

The way I have 1 of my xw's configured is

1-sata ssd running esxi (intel sata)

2 raid 0 15k drives on lsi sas

2 raid 1 2tb drives on lsi sata

My box with dual xeons and 16gb's of ram runs esxi like a champ.

[hppete]

Yeah, reading the tech specs for the machine it specifically states the SATA raid won't work on linux while the LSI probaly will.

Too bad SAS drives are so expensive.  Unless someone knows a good source.

[Vei]

The LSI card (you will see it on the mobo with the 8 ports), supports both sata and sas drives. So you can plug your sata ones and create raid volumes all the same.