Need a PCI-Express RAID controller for an ESXi host

[thecoolnessrune]

Actually, unless you have a RAID card with memory for caching and a battery to do write caching, the write hole issue and stripe landing issue could give you sub-single disk speeds with 4 disks.

If you get a BBU for your 9206 then with 512MB of cache you should be doing great for small writes.

 

[Ratman6161]

Actually, unless you have a RAID card with memory for caching and a battery to do write caching, the write hole issue and stripe landing issue could give you sub-single disk speeds with 4 disks.

If you get a BBU for your 9206 then with 512MB of cache you should be doing great for small writes.

Yes, thats what the UPS man will be delivering to me tomorrow sometime - the 9260-4i with 512 MB and battery.

 

[blckgrffn]

I put an HP BBU card in my Z67 board - wow, what a pain that was. Once you get it working, resist the urge to mess with RAID card firmware or UEFI updates. That's my $.02.

I flashed my card to the latest firmware and it put my ESXi box in to an infinite boot loop, refused to boot in any other UEFI based boards and finally I put in an older BIOS based board and was able to flash it back.

Write performance in ESXi without BBU is going to be utter crap as mentioned. To over ride the LSI card I tried I had to install Windows so that I could use the management utilities to tell the card to leave the write cache enabled.

Wow, that was a week of some crappy long nights getting things going. $400 worth of combined RAID cards and now it is humming along. Good luck with your setup 🙂

 

[imagoon]

To over ride the LSI card I tried I had to install Windows so that I could use the management utilities to tell the card to leave the write cache enabled

This is fully supported from ESXi. There is no reason install Windows to do it.

 

[blckgrffn]

This is fully supported from ESXi. There is no reason install Windows to do it.

After spending quite a bit of time trying to get it to work, it was ridiculously easier to get it done with windows. That took about 30 minutes of effort. SSD + USB install media.

I had a heck of a time with the LSI utilities. Doing this on a whitebox is such a one off exercise I didn't find much assistance in getting it done with my particular setup. I did make a post here about it even, I think.

 

[imagoon]

After spending quite a bit of time trying to get it to work, it was ridiculously easier to get it done with windows. That took about 30 minutes of effort. SSD + USB install media.

I had a heck of a time with the LSI utilities. Doing this on a whitebox is such a one off exercise I didn't find much assistance in getting it done with my particular setup. I did make a post here about it even, I think.

I guess it is based on what you consider "ridiculously easier." Install the VIBs and connect to it is a 5 minute operation. Granted installing VIBs to ESXi is second nature to me since it is a pretty common operation.

 

[blckgrffn]

I guess it is based on what you consider "ridiculously easier." Install the VIBs and connect to it is a 5 minute operation. Granted installing VIBs to ESXi is second nature to me since it is a pretty common operation.

Meh, it didn't go as the documentation I had secured had said it would go and after a couple of hours of effort and hair pulling late at night the answer was clear 🙂

I work (at the time...) with ESXi extensively, but the supported hardware we had at work was worlds different than the whitebox.

Installing windows and flipping the config switch was about five minutes of actual effort for me.

That's ridiculously easier and no special VIB installation knowledge required. For me.

Heck, I had to redo the HP installer to get it to work with the RAID card in ESXi to yank out the system check (not HP server? No drivers!). That was complicated - required rejiggering it on a debian based system - but that I got done with minimal frustration.

 

[SolMiester]

I put an HP BBU card in my Z67 board - wow, what a pain that was. Once you get it working, resist the urge to mess with RAID card firmware or UEFI updates. That's my $.02.

I flashed my card to the latest firmware and it put my ESXi box in to an infinite boot loop, refused to boot in any other UEFI based boards and finally I put in an older BIOS based board and was able to flash it back.

Write performance in ESXi without BBU is going to be utter crap as mentioned. To over ride the LSI card I tried I had to install Windows so that I could use the management utilities to tell the card to leave the write cache enabled.

Wow, that was a week of some crappy long nights getting things going. $400 worth of combined RAID cards and now it is humming along. Good luck with your setup 🙂

LOL, I had to settle for Server 2012 so I could do the same thing with ML350 G5 & onboard E2001, however now I have a P800 in my server, i cant be bothered changing from Hyper-V 2 to ESXi.....

 

[Ratman6161]

All, I thought I'd post an update after some time with the card.

The big thing to tell you is that all of you doing gyrations like installing windows just so you can run the management utilities or even using the command line on ESXi are completely wasting your time. Yup, don't bother

If you just download the Windows management utilities, they will connect to your ESXi box over the network. Yup, just install it on your desktop system and connect to your ESXi server. Just make sure that on the ESXi box, in the security profile you have the following:

Under Services: CIM Server
Under Firewall: CIM Server and CIM Secure Server and CIM SLP. In my case the CIM Secure server was there and enabled in the firewall but not running by default. Once I started it up, all was good.

In my case, when I start the client on my workstation, it tries to auto discover servers on the network but doesn't find mine. If I click on the "configure host button" and then choose the option to "Display all the ESXi-CIMON servers in the network of the local server" it then finds the IP of my ESXi box. I then log in as root and I'm in.

You can even install the client on a windows system that is itself a VM on the ESXi box though there are some down sides to that. For example I used the client to update the card to the latest firmware (what it came with was a year old) and it worked fine but told me I had to reboot the ESXi box to make the changes effective. It does not actually command the reboot. You go and shut down VM's, enter maintenance mode, reboot, etc from the VSphere client as usual. But, it still felt more comfortable to me to be running the client on my workstation rather than on a VM. But on a VM would definitely work.

Anyway this is a really cool capability and would be especially nice if you had several boxes to manage as they could all be managed from a single workstation.

Just thought you'd like to know though that all the gyrations are a waste of time.

 

[Jeff7181]

In case anyone's interested, I ended up blowing away my VMware environment and installing Ubuntu. LSI's management utility works great for managing the disks connected to the PERC.

 

[Emulex]

HPACUCLI works quite fine for P400/P410/P420/P430 with esxi 5.1 - LSI's has storcli and megacli for esxi 5.1

It's important to get to know these two utilities - especially since LSI cards don't auto rebuild if you do the ole pull and push trick (hp controllers will auto rebuild a semi-dead drive!).

It's very very very important to match the driver to firmware to utility version! LSI moreso than anything else. If you haven't seen a PSOD, find a LSI raid controller with old firmware and run esxi 5 - it won't take long.

 

[c674980]

I'm running HP Smart Array P800/512mb cards in my ESXI boxes, works fantastic. $88 with free shipping on Amazon right now. Just be aware they are very sizable cards and you'll need a SAS/SATA breakout cable.

Sorry XavierMace - I know this thread has been dead for 12 months . . . I'm hoping you might get this anyway.

I'm looking at the HP P800 as you said, but the doco says it only works in HP Integrity Servers?
If that's not correct and it will work in my whitebox, do you know what cable I'd need to connect it to 4 x Single SATA drives? The only cables I can see seem to go to come kind of cage?
Unless it's something like this? http://www.scorptec.com.au/product/Cables/SAS/49466-AT-MSAS-TO-4SATA?gclid=Cj0KEQjw6J2eBRCpqaW0857k9p4BEiQAWarYbHLTZpbrVvKjMyAav1wfsBUKpHZFMoD9ZYpUCDkBP5caArQM8P8HAQ

Sorry for the dumb questions!

 

[Burpo]

Something like this?
http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=102&cp_id=10254&cs_id=1025403&p_id=8195&seq=1&format=2

 

[c674980]

Something like this?
http://www.monoprice.com/Product?c_id=102&cp_id=10254&cs_id=1025403&p_id=8195&seq=1&format=2

Hmm - Thanks but that looks like an external one, but possibly put me on the right track. The trouble can be using things in ways that the manufacturer doesn't support!
I've just edited my post to show a link to a possibility. For some reason I was only looking for HP ones, not generic!

 

[Burpo]

Yeah, wasn't sure.. They're on ebay for $10.. Search; Mini SAS (SFF-8087) M to 4x SATA 7-Pin F

 

[c674980]

Yeah, wasn't sure.. They're on ebay for $10.. Search; Mini SAS (SFF-8087) M to 4x SATA 7-Pin F

Thanks for your help Burpo. If you hadn't broken me out of that looking for HP parts rut, I'd still be going in circles.

After lots of googling I found that the RAID Controller has a SFF-8484 Interface (Non standard - typical HP), but they're on EBay too.

I also found someone who is running one of these cards in a whitebox ubuntu server, so I should be right to go.

Thanks again.