VMDirectPath / Passthrough, Revodrive

[Rogean]

Hey Guys,

I'm wondering if the following scenario would work.

I have a Dell R710 with Perc 6/i controller in it, and the controller will have SAS hard drives in raid that houses Vmware ESXI 4.1 and yada yada, I know all that will work fine. Those hard drives will hold the Guest OS's.

My question is, if I install this in the server:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227596

Would I be able to VMDirectPath it to one of the Guest OS's? I'm not sure if VMDirectPath requires some form of compatibility, or as long as the host supports it any device can be passed through. The Revodrive would only be used as an additional drive/partition within that Guest OS to house an SQL Database. Since it is a fairly busy database, I was looking into the higher read/write and IOPS that the device would provide.

Machine is a Dell R710, 2x X5670 Xeon CPU's. Perc 6/i Controller with SAS hard drives that will house vmware ESXi 4.1.

Thanks in advance!

[DSTAVERT]

It is possible but not all devices work. I would have a look at the VMdirectpath Docs

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vsp_4_vmdirectpath_host.pdf

Have a look at http://www.vm-help.com/esx40i/esx40_vmdirectpath_whitebox_HCL.php

[AndreTheGiant]

DirectPath is a mapping of one card to one VM.

You cannot share the same card between more VMs.

Andre

[Dave_Mishchenko]

The "supported" list of devices is pretty small so there's no gaurantees with devices off the list.  It's a PCIe device so that'll eliminate the bus sharing issues that occur with PCI devices.  You might also consider Fusion-IO devices.  Much more pricy but they do provide ESXi support - http://community.fusionio.com/forums/t/31.aspx?PageIndex=2.

[joshuajamie]

I have a revodrive x2 100gb in a Dell R810, running ESXi 4.1.0, 348481. The revodrive is enabled for passthrough, I have it presented to a Server 2008 R2 x64 VM. I've installed the Windows 7 x64 driver, which is working fine. However the driver can't see the disk and nothing appears in disk management. So as far as I can see it doesn't work sadly.

[Rogean]

Thanks for the info.

I was literally over the "Pay now" button for buying it, figuring I'd take my chances, when the email popped up with your response lol.

That's a bummer it doesn't work. Guess I'll have to just use a regular SATA SSD through the Perc 6.

[joshuajamie]

I'm giving up on the direct passthrough and going back to trying to get it to show as a lun in the ESXi host itself. Just about to create a new thread regarding this as I'm a bit stuck!

[jAy1972]

Hi,

I have a two revodrive x2 100gb (and 120gb) in a Dell T610, running ESXi 4.1.0, 348481.

The revodrive's is enabled for passthrough.

The Solaris 11 VM is using the Revodrives. Have worked very good.

I updated the firmware (to 1.35) fwupd_v2.12.05 and that was stupid.

Now I get a purple bluescreen in ESXi when I start the Solaris VM.

I have to downgrade in order to get it working. We'll see if its gonna work.

// J

[regnak]

Hi,

Was thinking of a similar solution myself but two concerns appeared - one was on the newegg website where there was a lot of failures mentioned. The second is taken from the OCZ website which may be the cause of your issue:

"note that due to limited option ROM space, it is often not possible to use the RevoDrive while the Onboard RAID Controller is enabled on many motherboards"

It's a pity as it's one of the cheapest PCI SSD options out there, I'd have to sell my car to get an IODrive to play with!

I'm back looking at OCZ Vertex 3 but getting SATA 6GB/s support in rack servers is tricky, the signalling quality of SATA 3 may cause me problems, i'm not sure if current SAS 6GB/s is of the same quality. FYI - look at the LSI 9260-4i controller and their fastpath/cachecade options which may offer some interesting choices. I love some of the hybrid sata/ssd controller cards but again don't see them being compatible with vSphere, but they might work with Directpath and a storage VM like Nexentastor to get Dedup with NFS/iSCSI.

Happy Hunting!

Mike