microserver esxi hardware raid....?

Harpss1ngh · 17 Feb 2012 at 23:37

deano said:
which card would be better out of the ServeRAID M1015 or the Adaptec 2405 as they are pretty much the same price..... Have now configured 4 x 1Tb 7200rpm hitachi drives in RAID 10 on the ServeRAID M1015 will let you know findings later

As neither support RAID 5 they're no good to me. I'm looking at the Adaptec 5405 which has more cache memory (256mb) than the Adaptec 2405 (128mb) and higher CPU (800mhz dual core on 2405 compared to 1.2ghz dual core on 5405).

They're both visually the same and have the low profile bracket too so very painless installation

Not sure if there are any LSI ones that can be picked up.

Yes it's much more expensive but if you look carefully a bargain can be had!

Out of the M1015 and 2405 I'd go with whichever's the cheapest as they're practically both the same feature wise (not sure performance wise however)

deano · 18 Feb 2012 at 09:13

I'm running raid 10 which is proving to be pretty good on the micro server bottle neck now is the CPU - no surprise there.

I got my M1015 for £60 delivered

quite a bargain I think.

Performance on the micro server with the m1015 in raid 10 is acceptable certainly better than just a mirror. Think I'll probably end up getting a ML110 G7 with an i3 in it.

Harpss1ngh · 22 Feb 2012 at 12:56

I just bought an Adaptec 5405 for £120 which is a £300 Hardware RAID card that does RAID 5 (as well as 6, 10, 50, 60...you get the idea) and has 256mb cache and 1.2ghz dualcore on board!

I tried this in the microserver on ESXi and it didn't go as smoothly as I thought. ESXi supports the card however I can't see the drives in the vClient, however I can see the adapter. Adaptec Storage Manager is also not supported which is a shame so I can't administer RAID on the card without using the BIOS utility or get it to report failures, etc :/

I don't want to use Hyper-V so hoping to somehow make this work in ESXi

Little_Crow · 22 Feb 2012 at 14:51

Sounds like a bit of a bargain to me.

I assume from your post that you have already used the bios util to create and initialise an array?

In vSphere, click the host, in the right hand pane go to the configuration tab.
Click Storage adapters and you should see your adaptec card, under that should be listed an hba for each of the connectors on the card.
When you click on each (might only be 1) of these hba's does the details pane below remain empty?

If you've setup a RAID5 array using all 4 disks, you should see only 1 entry. If that's the case, then you just need to create a datastore by clicking storage, and then add storage.

========
Apologies if you know all this. I'm not sure how much existing knowledge you have with ESXi, so I've assumed none at all.

Harpss1ngh · 22 Feb 2012 at 18:52

Little_Crow said:
Sounds like a bit of a bargain to me.

I assume from your post that you have already used the bios util to create and initialise an array?

In vSphere, click the host, in the right hand pane go to the configuration tab.
Click Storage adapters and you should see your adaptec card, under that should be listed an hba for each of the connectors on the card.
When you click on each (might only be 1) of these hba's does the details pane below remain empty?

If you've setup a RAID5 array using all 4 disks, you should see only 1 entry. If that's the case, then you just need to create a datastore by clicking storage, and then add storage.

========
Apologies if you know all this. I'm not sure how much existing knowledge you have with ESXi, so I've assumed none at all.

Hi mate thanks for your reply, yeah I did use the bios utility. I've only configured RAID 1 on 2 disks at the moment as I'm waiting for hard drive prices to drop as they still seem inflated to me.

I tried creating a datastore but got an error whenit tried to create it. Had a quick look around and think its because of the array itself. Im rebuilding it now with the clear option to format it so will try again. It's a right PITA as i have to reboot into the cards bios as esxi doesn't support the asm utility which could have allowed me to do it without rebooting. Also a shame theres no gui for monitoring the array and managing the card, ridiculous in this day and age

Rangler · 22 Feb 2012 at 18:55

Running my ESXi5 box on an E200 with 128MB BBWC with 3x400GB WD RE2's here.
Controller cost me 30 squid and the WDRE drives were cheap enough as well, cant fault it.

Got sick of normal drives going offline in ESX due to poxy power saving issues.

Harpss1ngh · 22 Feb 2012 at 19:43

EDIT:

While creating the VMFS datastore I received the following error:

Call "HostDatastoreSystem.CreateVmfsDatastore" for object "ha-datastoresystem" on ESXi "192.168.0.186" failed. The task says An error occurred during host configuration. It's never straightforward is it lol

Little_Crow · 22 Feb 2012 at 22:17

Have you installed esxi on a USB stick, or on the partition you've created?

If it's the latter, It sounds remarkably similar to this VMWare KB article

Harpss1ngh · 22 Feb 2012 at 22:26

Hi I'm running it on a USB stick on the internal USB port on the microserver.

I was under the impression esxi would just repartition the array I selected to create the VMFS datastore. I've updated the firmware on the card (which was dated Feb 2008, to the one dated Feb 2012!) by sticking it in my PC and running the Adaptec Storage Manager from there, I've popped it back in and now I'm trying a low level format and then will recreate the array and try again. It is probably controller related, perhaps I'll have to manually do it via SSH like the KB article shows?

I searched the VMware KB but couldn't find anything specifically to my situation, unless I'm not looking hard enough

RimBlock · 23 Feb 2012 at 01:13

To my knowledge, ESXi does not provide tools to manage arrays at a controller level for any controllers. ESXi is designed to be as light as possible, so more like a low level framework, hence so many restrictions and hardware compatibility issues. You have to manage them in BIOS or, if you have the right hardware, you could pass the controller via VT-d to a VM with an operating system installed which is compatible with the controllers array management software. This is assuming you have ESXi installed on a separate drive not attached to the controller or a USB stick. Note you cannot generally pass individual disks or arrays to VMs using VT-d, it is the whole controller or nothing.

I have to do the same with the M1015 reflashed to a LSI 9240. I pass that via vt-d to my WHS-2011 server and manage the disks / arrays from there but the arrays are only available to the WHS-2011 server. This is no issue for me as the storage is for my medial which is shared via the WHS-2011 VM.

RB

Harpss1ngh · 23 Feb 2012 at 08:41

Yes however you can use CIM Providers. There is an Adaptec CIM Provider available for this controller. Will try passing the controller but I've read a lot of people having issues with this even with the fully supported Dell Perc and LSI controllers

RimBlock · 23 Feb 2012 at 08:47

Harpss1ngh said:
Yes however you can use CIM Providers. There is an Adaptec CIM Provider available for this controller. Will try passing the controller but I've read a lot of people having issues with this even with the fully supported Dell Perc and LSI controllers

Interesting, I was unaware so thanks for that.

VMWare seem to have a list here although Adaptec are not listed.

RB

Harpss1ngh · 23 Feb 2012 at 08:49

RimBlock said:
Interesting, I was unaware so thanks for that.

VMWare seem to have a list here although Adaptec are not listed.

RB

You can download the CIM Provider from Adaptec directly Here. That's the latest one.

BTW Can't do VT-T passthrough on a HP microserver as VMDirectPath is not supported

Update: Still having issue creating a datastore. ESXi becomes unresponsive

I'm going to patch ESXi to the latest fix as I'm currently running 469512 and there are 3 patches, the latest has build number 515841 which fixes some RAID-related issues, one of which seems to be the same thing I'm experiencing!

Do I need to download all 3 or just the latest one?

RimBlock · 24 Feb 2012 at 02:52

Harpss1ngh said:
You can download the CIM Provider from Adaptec directly Here. That's the latest one.

BTW Can't do VT-T passthrough on a HP microserver as VMDirectPath is not supported

Update: Still having issue creating a datastore. ESXi becomes unresponsive

I'm going to patch ESXi to the latest fix as I'm currently running 469512 and there are 3 patches, the latest has build number 515841 which fixes some RAID-related issues, one of which seems to be the same thing I'm experiencing!

Do I need to download all 3 or just the latest one?

Sorry cannot help here. I use LSI controllers & Intel boards and have had no issues to require patching, it just runs 'out of the box'. I shall take a look though as VM networking is pretty slow which is why I added an extra dual port Intel ET network controller and pass one port to each of my main VMs.

Rb

Harpss1ngh · 24 Feb 2012 at 08:44

RimBlock said:
Sorry cannot help here. I use LSI controllers & Intel boards and have had no issues to require patching, it just runs 'out of the box'. I shall take a look though as VM networking is pretty slow which is why I added an extra dual port Intel ET network controller and pass one port to each of my main VMs.

Rb

I know Intel boards have no problem, I stuck the ESXi dongle in my PC with the Raid card and it works fine. Must be an issue with ESXi not supporting passthrough on that microserver which runs a crappy AMD. I had originally planned to build a small box based on an Intel Core2Duo E8400, which would have run much much better, but this microserver was so hyped up all over the net I thought I'd give it a try, obviously a big mistake. It's cheap for a reason I suppose and you get what you pay for!

RimBlock · 24 Feb 2012 at 09:39

Harpss1ngh said:
I know Intel boards have no problem, I stuck the ESXi dongle in my PC with the Raid card and it works fine. Must be an issue with ESXi not supporting passthrough on that microserver which runs a crappy AMD. I had originally planned to build a small box based on an Intel Core2Duo E8400, which would have run much much better, but this microserver was so hyped up all over the net I thought I'd give it a try, obviously a big mistake. It's cheap for a reason I suppose and you get what you pay for!

That bad ?. I know if they ever came over here I would stock and sell them by the shed load but HP have decided not to sell them in Singapore for some reason so I build and sell mITX systems (among others).

ESXi with VT-d is probably a bit beyond them but is also a bit for a niche market

.

RB

Harpss1ngh · 24 Feb 2012 at 10:09

RimBlock said:
That bad ?. I know if they ever came over here I would stock and sell them by the shed load but HP have decided not to sell them in Singapore for some reason so I build and sell mITX systems (among others).

ESXi with VT-d is probably a bit beyond them but is also a bit for a niche market .

RB

I always prefer a custom box over these solutions because then at least you know what you're getting. The Zotax mITX motherboards are great and ESXi completely supports all the components that are integrated on them and has much better performance.

They microserver is good only because they're so cheap, but there are much better alternatives out there for the home.

Harpss1ngh · 26 Feb 2012 at 23:33

Update 26/02/2011:

Ok after much messing about by putting the Adaptec Raid card into my desktop, booting off the ESXi usb stick and successfully creating a Datastore I've come to the conclusion it's definately the microserver causing the issue. Most likely because it doesn't support VMDirectPath which my desktop does.

On the microserver I can create a datastore using that Adaptec 5405 RAID card on a single volume, it's only when I start using RAID levels that it starts crashing on that microserver, I had no issues at all on my desktop in my sig. I got a PSOD when trying to run that datastore I created in my desktop on the microserver so had to reinitialise.

Anyway in short, avoid the microserver if your devices need VMDirectPath. I'll probably build a ITX box with a Zotac itx motherboard which is fully supported by ESXi (and performs much better)

deano · 29 Feb 2012 at 18:59

any particular Zotac board you would recomend?

Harpss1ngh · 1 Mar 2012 at 01:24

I've managed to get ESXi to work with my RAID card, it seems to work fine and it's currently configured in a RAID5 Array. I can't figure out why it suddenly started working as all I did was remove the drives marked as single volumes and ESXi stopped freezing when creating a datastore. I already tried removing the drives before and ESXi had crashed and displayed a PSOD too. All I've done since then is disable the C1E halt state from the BIOS which I heard can cause issues and generate PSOD's (Pink Screen of Death's).

However I'd still recommend the Zotac motherboards in an mini-ITX case such as the Fractal Design on OCUK sell for better performance and can add up to 16GB of ram and wouldn't consume that much more power over the microserver, provided you don't add anything more than an i3 and stick with the onboard graphics.

I'd say the Zotac H67ITX-C-E Intel H67 one which OCUK sell which for a mini-ITX is fantastic, I'd pair that with an i3. Be aware that it's an HTPC motherboard but would still work fine, it's probably just a tad overkill if you're just using it as a file server as you can probably get a cheaper simpler board without the funky HTPC stuff if you're not likely to need it.