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I am running ESXi 4.1 on a ghetto whitebox (Gigabyte 890fxa with an AMD T1050 I think) and I want to add some more storage. Can anyone recommend a budget PCI/PCIe SATA expansion card with ~4 ports that will be supported by VMware? I don't need RAID functionality, and performance is not a factor really, I just need a controller that can be picked up by ESXi so I can add some more drives to my file server. Not a problem if the card is 2SATA + 2eSATA - I am already using eSATA-SATA cables from the onboard ports without any issues. I am hoping for something in the £30 range rather than the £200 range but I am not sure if that is going to be viable - obviously most people need hardware RAID to work for their purposes so I am struggling to find much info on the internet about support for the cheap cards. Any recommendations/pointers?
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Sep 25, 2012 10:58
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Corvettefisher posted:If storage is all you need why not run a VM on your desktop doing an Iscsi/NFS share? I'm not sure if I understand this - surely this would mean I have to have the desktop machine on at all times to access the storage? kinda defeats the point of having a file server if so, but like I say I might have missed something important. As it happens, I am actually passing the local drives through as RDM direct to the fileserver VM on the ESXi server so they are NTFS straight to disk - just makes life easier if something happens to the server and I need to get to the data - so this would not be ideal for me anyway. Like I said, I think this issue might be quite unique to me and my wacky setup - I will probably just buy some cheap controller and see what happens. I'll update the thread if it works in case anyone else needs to know.
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Sep 26, 2012 13:55
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Corvettefisher posted:Wait, what are you doing? Sorry I was under the impression this was just some box sitting around for labs and stuff. It's my home server, I use it for a variety of things, mostly just messing about to improve my VMware/linux knowledge - I decided to move all my files on there and at the same time experiment with using RDMs on local drives, seems to me that if ESX shits the bed then it is one less thing to worry about it if I can just chuck disks into any other windows machine to get the data.
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Sep 26, 2012 14:58
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I've got an issue with 4TB disks on my ghetto ESXi 5.1 whitebox.. I have a local SATA disk, and have set up the drive as an RDM (vmkfstools -z), but if I add the disk to my Server 2k8r2 VM, the partition table corrupts and I lose the disk, it only seems to see 512B. I've tried partedUtil -fixGpt but tells me there is no GPT partition. It seems this is a fairly common problem, just wondering if anyone has a simple solution. I've tried adding the disk as a datastore (VMFS-5) instead but it still won't let me create a 4TB disk - max 2TB. My fallback is to just create two 2TB disks and move on with my life but I would prefer to have it as an RDM (pure NTFS) disk if at all possible. Is there something obvious I am missing?
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Feb 14, 2014 12:04
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thebigcow posted:I thought datastores larger than 2TB was a feature of 5.5 I believe that GPT & 2TB+ support came in VMFS-5 with ESXi 5.0? I would try 5.5 but it won't work with my hardware. The drive is correctly listed under ESXi Config>Storage>Devices as 3.64TB though which suggests that vmware is correctly recognising it. It is plugged directly into the motherboard - Gigabyte GA-990FXA-UD5. The disk is a Seagate 4TB, not sure of the specific model but I can find out if need be. Here are the results of my playing about with it all day.. I created a ubuntu machine and installed Gparted - when adding the drive initially, it complains that the backup GPT partition is corrupt but the primary is ok - if I apply this, Gparted will crash. If I cancel it and create a new partition that works with no problems. I can then create a 4TB NTFS volume in Gparted and if I mount this it seems to be fine - I can create folders and documents (only small files, nowhere near the 2TB boundary), and it survives a reboot of either VM or the entire host. Doesn't automatically mount following a reboot but no doubt I could fix that with fstab if needed. If I remove the disk from the Ubuntu VM and add it to the Server 2k8r2 VM, I can see the volume and the folders created and I can create new files and folders. Disk properties>Volumes tabs reports the capacity as 0MB with unallocated space of -3815446MB which doesn't seem ideal.. however Volume List (at the top of the Disk Management window) and Windows Explorer both report the capacity correctly if slightly differently, 3,726MB in Disk Management and 3.63TB in Explorer. I can offline the disk and bring it back online and everything is still there. However, when I remove the disk from the Windows VM and add it back to the Ubuntu VM, the volume is lost and GParted again reports the partition table as corrupt. If I reboot the Windows VM with the disk attached, when windows comes back up it tries and fails to initialize the disk (error says the Disk Management View is not up to date) and the volume is gone. Seems like it could be a Windows issue, or something to do with the PVSCSI driver? I have VMware Tools installed on that machine, although I also tried without and got the same result. Tomorrow's plan is to scrap ESXi and install windows directly to the hardware I think, see what I get then. Possibly a hardware/controller issue, but I upgraded to the 990FXA specifically to deal with that so I hope not. Any suggestions would be really helpful - I am by no means a partitioning expert and this seems completely bizarre to me.
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Feb 14, 2014 20:09
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