blckgrffn
Diamond Member
Hey all -
I have been getting more "serious" with my home ESXi box and like many other folks picked up an Ebay IBM M1015 raid card, pre-crossflashed to LSI 9210 IR.
It works fine, seemingly. I wish there were a few more options (like quick/full initialize, etc.) - most of my experience is with PERC cards but I didn't want to bother with them as this is a much newer card than the cheap PERC cards out there and I am only interested in RAID 1.
I am using two Momentus XT 500GB drives in RAID 1. I wanted something a little better than a normal drive, and the low power consumption and SLC read cache enticed me along with a $80 per drive deal at newegg last week.
Anyway.
Prior to installing ESXi, the thing cruises past the Gigabyte BIOS "Loading Operating System" line, hits the USB CD-ROM, bam, installs fine.
Once ESXi is installed, it now takes some ~15 - 60 minutes for the "Loading Operating System" line to give way to actually installing the OS. WTF. The first time I rebooted, I had something else going and came back later. Then I was doing the little things like installing more fans, getting the HD header working with the RAID card, etc. Rebooted again, thought it was broke since it "hung."
I've probably re-installed ESXi five times, used new cables, changed motherboard slots, cleared the bios, destroyed/recreated the RAID volume multiple times, waited overnight for the drive init to finish before installing ESXi, etc.
Now I know just to walk away, take a deep breath, and watch a freaking movie or something while it boots.
Does anyone out there share my pain/experience?
I noticed LSI dropped a new firmware for the card on 6/5 (scary!) and there are several motherboard BIOS revisions newer than the one I have installed, so I'll be giving that a shot this weekend.
I have been getting more "serious" with my home ESXi box and like many other folks picked up an Ebay IBM M1015 raid card, pre-crossflashed to LSI 9210 IR.
It works fine, seemingly. I wish there were a few more options (like quick/full initialize, etc.) - most of my experience is with PERC cards but I didn't want to bother with them as this is a much newer card than the cheap PERC cards out there and I am only interested in RAID 1.
I am using two Momentus XT 500GB drives in RAID 1. I wanted something a little better than a normal drive, and the low power consumption and SLC read cache enticed me along with a $80 per drive deal at newegg last week.
Anyway.
Prior to installing ESXi, the thing cruises past the Gigabyte BIOS "Loading Operating System" line, hits the USB CD-ROM, bam, installs fine.
Once ESXi is installed, it now takes some ~15 - 60 minutes for the "Loading Operating System" line to give way to actually installing the OS. WTF. The first time I rebooted, I had something else going and came back later. Then I was doing the little things like installing more fans, getting the HD header working with the RAID card, etc. Rebooted again, thought it was broke since it "hung."
I've probably re-installed ESXi five times, used new cables, changed motherboard slots, cleared the bios, destroyed/recreated the RAID volume multiple times, waited overnight for the drive init to finish before installing ESXi, etc.
Now I know just to walk away, take a deep breath, and watch a freaking movie or something while it boots.
Does anyone out there share my pain/experience?
I noticed LSI dropped a new firmware for the card on 6/5 (scary!) and there are several motherboard BIOS revisions newer than the one I have installed, so I'll be giving that a shot this weekend.