I tried to install ESXi 5 on a Dell Server with PERC 6/i. It does not find a disk to install. I tried to install from PXE as well as from CD.

Is this controller not supported any more?

ESXi 4.1 U1 has no problems on this machine. But we would need a big local volume (+10TB). So we want to try the new VMFS in ESXi 5 which reportedly can handle volumes bigger that 2 TB (I'm no fan of extents).

It is still supported with ESXi 5 - http://partnerweb.vmware.com/comp_guide ... 0&vcl=true.

Have you tested to see if it can see a smaller disk? Is there an existing partition on the LUN?

Thank you for helping!

I already tried that: I completely removed the big RAID5 partition and left only the 160GB mirror for ESX. Now Linux `lsscsi´ gives me just /dev/sda. I also wiped it clean (zeroed out the first 10k sectors with `dd´). Nevertheless, ESXi 5 didn't find anything to install on.

The majority of the servers (ESXi, Linux, Windows) of us and of our customers uses a PERC 5 or 6 - in real Dell hardware as well as in other hardware, because these controllers are both cheap and quite powerful. So I'm experienced with them. But this is unusual...

I'll try again and look in the logs, as you mentioned for the Supermicro AOC-SAS2LP-H8iR controller.

Is it running the latest firmware?

Firmware is 6.2.0-0013

Now that's odd: the megaraid_sas driver was loaded during startup, the device is listed and shows the expected PCI ID - but there's no module attached to it.



On ESXi 4.1 it looks like

# lspci -p | grep megaraid_sas
000:001:00.0 1000:0060 1028:1f0b 10/ 10/0x68 A V megaraid_sas vmhba1

The logfile says "looking for devices" and then "claimed 0 device".

I'll remove all settings from the PERC and re-create the boot mirror again. But both Linux and ESXi 4.1 U1 do see the RAID volume on this machine.

>> The logfile says "looking for devices" and then "claimed 0 device".
This would be for ESXi 5 - correct?

It looks like they didn't include all the correct PCI ids which the driver. You'd either have to wait for an update, re-compile your own version using VMware's source, or use a hex editor to update the driver to recognize your specific PCI ids.

No change: "driver megaraid_sas claimed 0 device".

You're probably right. I swapped the PERC 6/i with a 5/i and everything works well now!

So, at the moment, PERC 6 really isn't supported in ESXi 5.

Just an FYI, I'm using a Perc 6/i with no issue for my datastore (ESX itself is running off a USB thumb drive). I had to load the LSI CIM providers to get health reporting, but that was the only extra step I had to take to get things working as they did in 4.1.