Perc 5i?

[Virtuali3ed]

Hi Forum, any idea if perc 5i is working with esxi4?

Thanks in advance!

[Scissor]

I have a Perc 5/E that works under ESXi4. I think they're the same card just that my /E has an external connector?

[Virtuali3ed]

Thanks for the confirmation.

[Webio]

I have Dell PowerEdge 2900 with PERC 5/i and its working without problems.

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Is that with ESXi 3.5 or 4.0?

[Webio]

ESXi 4.0

[Dave_Mishchenko]

Thanks.

[serno]

I know some ctrl cards does not show logical disk, but only separate disk as native units.

Are you able to use ful raid functionality (RAID1 or RAID 5)?

Are you using sas or sata disks?

Plz, post your cfg.

[COdlk]

It may work but its not on the HCL for ESXi 4.

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php

If you do have a problem and you call into VMware they may not support you. I have tried ESXi 4 with a PERC 6/i controller and it installed fine but would not boot after the install.

david

[onsik]

PERC 5i - internal SAS/SATA RAID controller

PERC 5e - external SAS/SATA RAID controller (in Dell used for connecting MD1000 or MD3000)

PERC 5i is very similar to PERC 6i (newer generation). The difference is that PERC 6i has memory integrated on the card and supports additionally RAID 6 and 60.

I have installed ESX 4 on PE2950 with PERC 5i (2 disk in RAID1) without any problems.

Good luck

Onsik

[Virtuali3ed]

I have a Perc 5i 256 MB write cache Working with ESXI 4 using 4 SATA 3.0 drives in RAID 5 with BBU unit. No issues so far I was also able to expand RAID 5 array by adding an additional disk keeping all the datastore and VMs on it intact and eventually was able to expand the datastore itself.

[serno]

Great!

That was exctly what i hoped you wrote.

Ciao.

[Cody_Page]

There may be a typo on the HCL.

ESX 4.0 is listed as compatible with both the PERC 5i and 6i controller however; no PERC cards are being shown as compatible with ESXi 4.0.

[serno]

Following your suggestion......

I've just got 2 DELL PERC 5/i + BBU and 512 MB (Ebay €. 110,00 each one)

I've plugged in my ML115 G5 Quad Opteron with 4x 2048 MB Corsair DHX Dual-Path DDR2

Plugged 4 sata cable to 4 x 500 GB Barracuda

Switched on

2 minutes for configuring RAID (created only one datastore with max capacity available with speed format)

Booted with my ESXi 4.0 Build 164009 from my USB Pen Drive

System has been recognized immediatly (it seems that storage attached to PERC is Parallel SCSI even if it is SATA)

Now it's time to upload some vm's

Ciao.

[J1mbo]

Make sure you're patched to U1 if using this controller - it's cache is not properly flushed on shutdown with some earlier releases.

[can1979]

does work but you have to "vt-d" disable on bios

vt-d is very nice option on vanvmware.

I need for my vt-d pci adapters

I have perc 5 / i tested on ESXi 4

6 perc or know someone with vt-d option works?

[evandena]

can1979,

Is this a bug that VMware can fix? I am running into the same problem.

[RODGEK195]

I have several Dell 1950III Servers with the Perc5i cards installed. I am getting very poor performance from 2x Caviar Black 64mb Cache 1Terra Drives.

I have been looking all over the place for help.

Benchmark of Raid 0 for the 2 drives is only a through put avaerage of 97mb/s when the drives them selfs on a standard PC without raid will top a through put of over 150mb/s

I have no idea why i am getting such poor performance. Even switching it to write back and read ahead i get 108mb/s avarge but the burst rate goes up to 310mb/s from 283mb/s

I also decovered a "pn939 interposer board" that is also available to work with my drives will this improve performance and what are these interposer's actually for as i have never used them before.

I was hoping to use these servers for VM with centos 5.5 O/S. and one last thing if anyone can tell me how to sync the Perc5i Raid 0 blocks with the OS/ format i would be very greatfull as i am new to linux.

Cheers

RODGEK195

[mvrk]

I've tried Dell Perc 5/i on both ESXi 4 / 5 and it hangs at boot (Loading scheduler...)

Maybe it doesn't like my motherboard? Anyone tried this card on a non dell machine?