I'm not real experienced with hardware RAID cards, but just purchased a PERC 5/i as an upgrade for my ESXi box. Typically, I've done all configurations in the PERC BIOS on bootup. Is there another way to manage this on an ESXi host, as my PERC board is taking up the only PCI-E slot that my current mobo has, and my PCI video card recently crapped out on me.

Is there any other option other than a PCI video card? I don't think I have a serial port on the board either, but if I did could I enable that as a console port? Seems I have seen talk about this somewhere. Just a thought.

TravisT

I've heard that can you push the output of ESXi to a serial port, but that wouldn't help you in the BIOS.

With newer LSI based cards you can manage them via ESXi's CIM interface but I don't think that would help with the Perc5 as it is a bit of an older card. I think you'll need to get the video card.

I did notice after installing the card that in vcenter it showed some status of the card. I specifically remember it showed the BBU state as charging. There were no configurable parameters that I found in the few minutes that I tested the card. Does CIM provide a way to configure raid arrays/other options on certain cards?

You can use MegaRAID Storage Manager and it connects via CIM - http://kb.lsi.com/KnowledgebaseArticle16430.aspx.

Sorry for not getting back with you on this post until now.

I attempted to install that software per the instructions on a machine on my LAN. I was not able to connect to the card. I'm not sure if the fw revision is incorrect or because it's not running the LSI firmware (running original dell fw).

I also had this card fail on me (I believe it overheated). I am out of the country and will not have physical access to it for about a year. I'm having a new card installed tomorrow, but would really like to have some way to be alerted when things start to go wrong (either temps, or degraded arrays).

Are there any ways to do this that can be configured rather easily from a remote location? I have remote access to the host via virtualcenter and ssh.

Any help would be greatly appreciated!

Travis