
ESXi 5 will not see LSI Adapter VD's on Supermicro X9SCM-F-O
I am going insane!
Newegg peeps report installing ESXi 5 to this motherboard, with adapters, ok.
I have tried: ESXi 5 original, and driver rollup ISOs. Installed from cd rom sata and usb cd rom.
Install ESXi 5 to usb flash drive, separate Sata drive. I need it on a simple RAID 1 on the adapter card.
I have tried the following LSI cards with no success getting them to show up either in ESXi installer, or after installing to USB flash or single SATA HD.
LSI 9260-8i
LSI 9240-8i
Dell Perc H200
All of these are on the Vmware HCL. Same problem with each.
All of these devices do show up after install as a pass-thru device. I messed with all the BIOS settings with no change.
No matter what I tweak, the installers for both ZenServer 6 and Windows 2008 R2 see the LSI adapter volume and install direct to it NO PROBLEM. I don't have a 4.1 download to try, have to downgrade license?
I have narrowed it down to the motherboard.
Supermicro X9SCM-F-O. 1155, Xeon E-1230.
The on-board Sata is Cougar point based, with options: disabled, IDE, AHCI, or RAID. (Which I have all tried.) Now RAID has an option of two code bases, Intel or LSI software raid.
I heard elsewhere that sometimes enabling the onboard RAID will help. I thought there could be conflict, but I see absolutely no change.
ESXi sees a cougar point SATA controller and sees individual drives of course. The code base for the software raid is irrelevant.
With the original August ESXi 5 release, some have reported leaving the RAID card out, updating drivers, then putting the card back in.. I tried this too with no luck.
Passthru with VT-d on works fine for all cards. ESXi simply does not recognize the MegaRAID device and VD's.
Goal: have a 8 (ht) core backup EXSi 5 machine that we can Veeam replicate VM's to it, and we can run critical VM's in case our primary ESXi host is down. (Essentials Kit, no vMotion). We need the LSI RAID 9240-8i to work for a large RAID LUN of 8 drives, RAID 50. We need the large LUN size for backups.
Next thoughts:
1. Install ESXi to one of the (RAID1) drives from the onboard sata, then connect to the LSI adapter and "rebuild" a mirrored RAID 1. Then force the computer to boot to that drive. ESXi should boot from itself, right?
2. Manually format the RAID 1 volume as a bootable VMFS, using Linux tools?
3. Install ESXi on another system with the LSI 9240-8i card and drives set, then move it to this and set as boot drive?
4. Return the motherboard for a different one, perhaps an ASUS?
LSI support has been totally awesome; Fred thought only the 9260-8i is supported on ESXi 5. (Not 9240) But I tried the 9260 with same problem.
Help!

Thank you! - Andrew