HP SATA RAID Support

[Michael DeVicariis]

I have an HP DL 140 G3 with 2 SATA drives. I also purchased an HP DL 120 G6 with SATA drives.



I am able to get VMware ESXi 4 installed just fine. However, it completely ignores the RAID setup I configure in the BIOS. Is there a workaround for this? Are there any drivers available? I also tried the HP customized version of ESXi 4 with no luck.



Any help would be appreciated.

[TTr]

> it completely ignores the RAID setup I configure in the BIOS

Maybe it does not. Where (which disk) did ESX get installed on?

[Michael DeVicariis]

It installed on the first disk and created "datastore1". It also created "datastore2" on the other disk. Both disks are ~270GB each. datstore1 is slightly lower capacity (~264GB) due to the ESXi installation.

[TTr]

> it completely ignores the RAID setup I configure in the BIOS

What did you set up in the BIOS? If you set up logical volumes in the BIOS raid controller configuration screen, the OS would not see the physical drives. Did you configure two raid0 drives or one raid0 with two LUNs and those are the ones ESX saw and used to install?

Which of the two servers are you talking about? And what kind of raid controller did you get with each server?

[Michael DeVicariis]

I configured a RAID 1 (mirror) or 1 logical drive. If I reboot and view the BIOS/RAID config, it still shows 1 logical drive (mirror).

BTW, the VMware forum says that it's definitely software raid in the BIOS and will now work. This testing is pointing that way. They say we'll need to get a hardware RAID card for this server.

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1470650#1470650

[Daniel Bowers]

They're right, neither ESX 3.X nor 4.0 supports firmware RAID, aka chipset RAID.

The "Embedded SATA RAID controller" in the DL140 G3 is firmware RAID. It's basically just the Intel SATA controller plus a RAID stack in the firmware of the server BIOS. I don't think there's any work-around; you'll hae to use a a hardware RAID controller (i.e. a PCI card) if you want RAID.

Many people who use ESXi don't RAID the boot drive at all, the idea being that the ESXi drive isn't getting hit with a lot of I/O, and the image on the drive can easily be restored.

Per the quickspecs, the DL120 G6 doesn't even have the Embedded SATA RAID, it's just Embedded SATA, so you'd definitely need a RAID card there.