Using ESXi 5.5 with HP DL120 Gen9 Storage Controller (HP H240 FIO Smart Host Bus Adapter)

[schmitgregwav]

Hi guys, I am new to virtualization but I couldn't find a solution for this. Feel free to correct my wording as I am not incredibly experienced with this sort of thing.

Background: I have a couple servers and the end-game will be to use lefthand to create a SAN and run other systems within this SAN (providing network-level RAID). While in a data center I might decide to do a hardware-level RAID in addition to network-level RAID, right now I want to save money on storage for this testing so I want to do simple spanned disks (non-raid/JBOD) on the hardware level. Due to the OS we are going to virtualize later we need to use ESXi 5.5, not 6.0.

I actually had a small supermicro server that I've already installed ESXi 5.5 onto that doesn't have a whole lot of storage which will be the 3rd voting member in lefthand.

So I setup the 2 servers (HP ProLiant DL120 Gen9 E5-2630v3 8GB-R H240 8SFF 550W PS Entry Server(777425-B21)) and I went into the BIOS/CMOS settings and switched to the AHCI mode from the smart-array mode (I can't remember the wording of it, I'm not in front of the machine currently). I then went into the intelligent provisioning and went to the smart storage administrator part and I had to select "turn off RAID", or something like that. After rebooting I went back in and now my two disks show up as "unassigned" which seemed sensible to me. I tried to see if I could "assign" them but in the non-RAID mode there is no way to assign them to anything because arrays essentially don't exist in the non-RAID mode. I wasn't sure if there is a way to "initialize" them or something like that, but I couldn't find any settings like this. My hope was that an OS would now see these drives natively as simple drives without the abstraction layer of a storage controller.

This didn't work and when I run ESXi 5.5 from a USB it will initialize but when it gets to the part where you're supposed to select the disk to install ESXi onto it only shows the USB drive itself and none of my SSDs.

Does anyone know how to configure the H240 HBA with ESXi 5.5? I could really use some help from someone who has done this before.

Thanks for any help!

[schmitgregwav]

I am going to move this to the vSphere ESXi 5 community later today if there are no responses because I didn't see that community earlier and this question is really better suited there.

Still if you have any thoughts or if you know how to do this, don't hesitate to let me know!

-GNS

[vervoortjurgen]

hello

you shouldnt disable your raid controller; you always need that

configure your disks in Jbod so you can access them from vsphere

or i see you mention SSD

if you have 3 esxi hosts with 1x SSd and 1 SAS/SATA disk you can go with vsan (also available in 5.5 u2)

raid controller should be in pass through or Raid 1 but lookup in vmware HCL if your controller supported for VSAN ofcourse

hope this helps

[schmitgregwav · Accepted solution]

I figured it out guys after a few hours of toying with it. I had to pull the storage controller driver off of HP's website and bundle it with the ISO (I used VMware Front Experience: ESXi-Customizer). After doing that I ensured that AHCI (instead of HP Dynamic Smart Array RAID) was enabled (in BIOS setup) and then disabled RAID in the HPSSA (smart storage administrator). I was then able to see the SSDs in the ESXi 5.5.

vervoort jurgen, ESXi 5.5 didn't recognize the SSDs when I had RAID enabled and configured 1 array for each disk (to make an effective JBOD). I also tried a single RAID 0 array with the two SSDs in it and ESXi still wouldn't detect them. I think the underlying issue is that the driver is not natively supported by ESXi 5.5. Right now I'm sure that if I went and configured RAID it would work because the storage controller driver is loaded into ESXi.

Anyway, hopefully this will help any other people having these same issues.

-GNS

[atn22]

I had the same issue with ProLiant ML150, and you helped me resolve it. Thank you so much!