esxi 6 problem on G7

[Tony Barrett_2]

We have some DL380 G7's I'm trying to install ESXi 6.0 U3 on. The servers are working fine and fully up to date with all firmware. The RAID controller is a standard P410i.

All the drive bays are full as follows

Bay 1/2 : 2 x HP 72GB SAS (RAID1)

Bay 3/4/5/6/7/8 : 6 x HP 300GB SAS (RAID5)

I'm using the HP custom image of ESXi 6 U3 from Feb 2017, but have also tried the standard VMware one.

When installing ESXi, the process will hang at the message 'vmkibft loaded successfully' and not get any further. After much testing, I found if I remove the RAID5 array from the system, so I just have the RAID1 disks, everything works perfectly and the install completes ok. Re-enable the RAID5 array, and the boot process hangs again at the same place. Research has shown this is a common problem, and affects ESXi 5.5 as well on the same hardware. There was no single fix though from what I could find.

Is there *any* solution to this? It's massively frustrating when I just need to install ESXi which is normally a very quick process.

Thanks

[dseguin]

For what it's worth I just ran across this problem and found a solution.  I had two drives in a mirror for the OS and six to create another VMFS datastore.  Updating the driver/firmware did not help.  If I pulled the six drives it would boot.  I then put the six drives back in and deleted the logical volume and voila.  Evidently these repurposed drives had data on them that ESXi could not deal with.  I recreated the logical volume in RAID50 instead of 5 and all is well.