tlsnine Posted June 13, 2021 Share #1 Posted June 13, 2021 (edited) As the title says, only 3 of 4 hard drives are found in my ds918+ "bare metal" virtual instance in ESXi 6.7 when connected to an LSI sas9220-8i controller card when using passthrough mode. Before toggling passthrough mode, all 4 drives are seen in ESXi individually. All 4 drives are also seen if I connect them to the motherboard's onboard SATA ports, however passthrough isn't an option with the onboard controller. (drives are setup as RDM) Not sure if anyone else has seen this before. I know the drives are good and I know the LSI controller is good along with the SAS cables. Because I'm passing the drives via the SAS card do I have to adjust my grub.cfg file??? For S&G I tried setting up a virtual ds3615 but I can't get the network working properly so I can't find the machine on my network. (tried vmnet and e1000 emulation) I'm a little perplexed and any assistance is appreciated! Edited June 13, 2021 by tlsnine spelling Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tlsnine Posted June 13, 2021 Author Share #2 Posted June 13, 2021 Ok, so I might have figured it out... I've gone into the ESXi settings and removed ALL virtual hard drives, cd/dvd, other virtual sata controllers, etc leaving JUST my passthough PCI device (which is my LSI controller) Rebooted my VM and now all 4 physical hard drives are showing and I can assign them to a storage pool. Guess it's got something to do with how the ds918+ only sees 4 drives natively. Not questioning it too much right now. I'll post if I find any other weirdness. Hope this helps someone! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
flyride Posted June 14, 2021 Share #3 Posted June 14, 2021 (edited) Enumeration of disks to slots happens by controller order from lowest PCI slot to highest. If you have extra virtual SATA controllers in there that aren't doing anything, the SAS controller gets pushed to the end and drives may get mapped out of the accessible range. FMI: Edited June 15, 2021 by flyride 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tlsnine Posted June 14, 2021 Author Share #4 Posted June 14, 2021 Thanks for the explanation! I kinda sorta figured it was something to that effect, but actually knowing the process behind it will help going forward. Thanks again and play safe Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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