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Can't import xpeno from bare metal to ESXi on Gen8


yaroslava

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Hi,

 

I have a xpeno 5.0 running on HP Micro Gen8 bare-metal. After an upgrade to RAM I'm trying to move the system to ESXi without success.

On bare metal, using the b120 controller (each hdd is in RAID0) or the AHCI SATA works without any issues, xpeno simply boots up.

 

Like the others indicates on this forum, for ESXi I have used the RAID0 approach with the controller, installed the dedicated ESX 6.0 ISO, downgraded the driver to 5.5.088 for maximum speed, created a VM and mounted the HDD as RDMs. With both 5.0 and 5.2, the hdds content is not properly recognized - when booting, the install interface appears mentioning there's nothing installed.

Going back to bare metal indicates the configuration lost however after installing everything is the same.

 

However If I go ahead with the install in ESXi, the data partition is not formatted yet nothing is found.

 

I have tried this with both nanoboot and DSM 5.0 and latest xpeno and 5.2. It basically looks like RDM simply doesn't preserve the proper structure for some reason.

 

To make things worse, in ESXi not using the controller seems unstable; the devices are found yet 5-10' ESXi stops viewing then and gets stuck.

 

Any tips folks on how to migrate things between bare-metal and ESXi on Gen8? I'd like to avoid having a complete reinstall simply because in case something goes wrong, I'd like to be able to reuse the HDD outside ESXi.

 

thanks!

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As a quick update, after 3 days of going back and forth it looks like there's an issue with the HP drivers.

If I'm using legacy sata, the drives are picked up without a hiccupt. Through the controller though they aren't (they work fine though on bare-metal). So likely the driver messes something up. I'll probably have to try different versions hoping I can find one that works. Ironically the new versions are known to be quite slow and most people downgrade ...

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Replying to myself, it looks like the ESXi drivers for B120i doesn't properly support HDD bigger than 4 TB (in my case 6TB). When bypassing the RAID controller and mounting the drivers as SATA AHCI or Legacy, the RDM works fine. Through the controller, it simply does not recognize the partition...

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Hi.

 

I've tried myself also to mount my old syno disks as RDMs in ESXi 6, but this option is greyed out (N54L server with modded bios). Searching the net, I understand that this may be a limitation of supporting the onboard sata controller as RDM by the ESXi 6, so how did you manage to do this?

Also I have tried to install a package to enable all the available HW health status sensors with no luck (still see only "Processors" and "Software components")

I would appreciate any help here.

Tnx

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