LSI ESXI and Xpenology - Fujitsu T2540 M1

[jacksonsystems]

Hi all

 

I have ESXI running on my Fujitsu TX2540 M1 - Server has built in LSI Raid on motherboard. I have configured 4 2.73 TB Drives in RAID10+1. ESXI installed on an SSD on SATA0 on the motherboard. 

 

ESXI is installed and up and running but for some reason even though the drives are configured in RAID (RAID status says 5.42TB of Spac across member disks) ESXI is seeing them as individual disks - I as expecting to see the 5.42TB RAID Volume.

 

I have created a storage pool adding in all of the disks and attached that to my Xepenology VM and it is working fine.... but it worries me that the drives are not redundant. 

 

As far as I can see the LSI controller is supported.

 

Anyone else had issues?

 

Any ideas on how I can get the volume into ESXI raher than seperate disks - I realize ths may be a specific ESXI issue and not Xpenology.

 

Thanks

 

 

[flyride]

Arguably this is the wrong approach.  The point of DSM is to do sophisticated software RAID and not leave that task to comparatively unintelligent firmware on your hardware controller.

 

So you really "want" to see individual disks so that those disks can be presented to your guest running DSM.  Best case passthrough the RAID controller entirely to DSM if it is supportable.  If that doesn't work, you can create an RDM profile for each drive and attach those to your guest.

 

You'll get the best performance and array features (btrfs self-healing, dynamic RAID management, more RAID options, SHR if you want that) if you let DSM do the work.

[jacksonsystems]

6 minutes ago, flyride said:

Arguably this is the wrong approach.  The point of DSM is to do sophisticated software RAID and not leave that task to comparatively unintelligent firmware on your hardware controller.

 

So you really "want" to see individual disks so that those disks can be presented to your guest running DSM.  Best case passthrough the RAID controller entirely to DSM if it is supportable.  If that doesn't work, you can create an RDM profile for each drive and attach those to your guest.

 

You'll get the best performance and array features (btrfs self-healing, dynamic RAID management, more RAID options, SHR if you want that) if you let DSM do the work.

OK so the best approach being then if I pass the disks hrough using JBOD on the raid.

Then attahc them to the DSM VM direct through ESXI?

 

Not sure what the RDM profiel is?!

[flyride]

You can't exactly pass disks through.  You can pass controllers and disks come with them.

 

Or you can use RDM = Raw Device Mapping.  It will take a ESXi-addressable block storage device and create an alias that can be added to a guest VM, and it behaves as a SATA drive.  A way to support controllers and disk device types that DSM cannot handle. 

 

See this: https://xpenology.com/forum/topic/12391-nvme-optimization-baremetal-to-esxi-report/?tab=comments#comment-88690

 

[jacksonsystems]

Just now, flyride said:

You can't exactly pass disks through.  You can pass controllers and disks come with them.

 

Or you can use RDM = Raw Device Mapping.  It will take a ESXi-addressable block storage device and create an alias that can be added to a guest VM, and it behaves as a SATA drive.  A way to support controllers and disk device types that DSM cannot handle. 

 

See this: https://xpenology.com/forum/topic/12391-nvme-optimization-baremetal-to-esxi-report/?tab=comments#comment-88690

 

Ah ok I see in PCI devices that I can see the Chipset etc and it will allow me to pass that through - I dont see LSI though. I shall do some playing around and see what I can do!

 

Ill check out that link yo posted, thanks.