BL260C and VMware

[TClark]

Hi,

Apologies if this is a newbie question - but we're trying to get ESXi installed on a BL260c blade - but it keeps showing our RAID 1 array as 2 separate disks at the install stage.

I've tried installing VMware straight from vmware.com and also the "VMware ESXi 4.0 from HP - ESXi HD/USB/SD Image Installer" distro on the HP site - but both do the same thing. The boot screen shows that the disks are setup correctly as a RAID 1, but VMware sees them as 2 disks.

What am I missing?

Thanks in advance,

Tim

[Adrian Clint]

I dont know the answer... but I'm wondering if ESXi has driver support for the SATA array controller.

[Bill Brothers_1]

I spent a great deal of time trying to get the VMWare ESX3.5 installed on the SATA controller and was never totally successful. I finally gave in ran without RAID. I have a tickler to go back and try using the linux drivers for the non-embedded version of ESX. Enabling RAID in the BIOS makes the disks non-visible to the 3.5.2 installer. I think it is possible to resolve but I just ran out of time to work through it. This is no different than any other linux install with "foreign" disk control.

[Daniel Bowers · Accepted solution]

ESX doesn't support the controller in "RAID" mode. It only supports the controller in SATA (non-RAID) mode.

The "Embedded SATA RAID Controller" on the BL260c G5 uses the SATA controller on the Intel ICH9R chipset, with a firmware-based RAID stack. VMWare doesn't support that; there's a short discussion about that here:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1157785