Dell Poweredge T110 esxi and RAID

[Gerardv514]

Hi all,

i currently have a dell poweredge t110 (first gen) I would like to add raid to this system, but I am just confused on the different configurations. I believe this box may only support on board raid, but I believe this is software raid; which esxi doesn't support. So I would like to purchase a raid controller, I've read about perc's and sas6i's. my question is which is better I've seen documentation as to what is supported for this box, any insight would greatly be appreciated.

Thanks

[ArchParks]

I went round and round with a T110 1sg Gen about a year ago. It hated any 3rd party raid controller withe the early iteration of BIOS that the machine used. I was about to get an Adaptec 6405E to work. There is an updated BIOS that will make your life much easier.

Arch

[Gerardv514]

Updating the bios from esxi, is it easiest to load a vm running windows 7 let's say, to update bios and other drivers from within windows 7?

[ArchParks]

I doubt that ESX will let a client VM touch the bios of the machine (I've never heard of that being possible???). You need to boot from a DOS disk (or flash drive) and flash it that way. I use unetbootin.

Creating a Bootable DOS Flash Drive the Easy Way

http://techgage.com/article/creating_a_bootable_dos_flash_drive_the_easy_way/

easiest way to create a usb DOS boot disk

http://www.chavers.us/robs-place-mainmenu-42/17-ubuntu-notes/46-easiest-way-to-create-a-usb-dos-boot-disk-using-linux

Arch

[Gerardv514]

Thanks Arch I will look into this. In regards to the raid controller I've seen some dell documentation stating raid controllers. One of them being a perc and the other was a sas. 6/ something. Would you say that your attempt of a raid controller didn't go to well because it wasn't on dells list? Despite you flashing the bios and all was well after that

[ArchParks]

From what I remember reading, there was an issue becuse eaxctly what you said - it was not on the Dell list. It didnt matter what I did, it would no boot from the drives attched to the RAID device, I had to install a pair of small drives on the on board software raid controller and then it let me install Widnows in the Adaptec RAID controller.  Note, becuse of that, I could not use ESXi and was forced to run Windows straight on the hardware (no ESXi involved).

Once the BIOS upgrade came out, I was able to get rid of the on board softraid junk and install ESXi on the Adaptec 6405e contolled drives. That setup works great!

Note, I used this site to add the Adaptec drivers to the initial boot image / ESXi install-ISO:

ESXi-Customizer

http://www.v-front.de/p/esxi-customizer.html

Arch

[Gerardv514]

Arch, first let me thank you for your time, this information will definitely gear me toward what I'm looking to accomplish. In regards to your raid setup, I'd assume they were internal drives, are you able to hot swap drives when the tower was on?

On another note I am trying to use the dell open manage software. I did download my esxi image directly from dell. This tower seems to have a BMC utility I think it's called in which I can set an IP address, kind of like a drac, but from my understanding is that you need open manage installed on an os. I have yet to test installing open manage on my win 2008 r2 vm, is this the correct way?

[ArchParks]

Glad to help!

Yes, they were internal drives. I've never tried to hot swap them! Knock on wood, I've never had one fail!

For the heck of it, I've installed the Dell Open manage thing on a few Dell Servers just to see if I caould make it work. In each case, after I saw that I could use the info, I honestly never really saw a great need for it. If I remember right, I instalee the "Dell OpenManage Offline Bundle and VIB for ESXi" from the ssh command line of the esxi server ...sort of like this:

http://communities.vmware.com/people/vmroyale/blog/2012/07/26/how-to-use-dell-dset-with-esxi

[lakshya32]

Hi

Welcome to the communities.

there is very less or zero impact if you will upgrade BIOS.

Up gradation of BIOS generally resolve boot or driver related problem.

"When you fail to plan, you plan to   fail."