Hello everyone
I am new here, so I am sorry if this thread is misplaced. I just picked the section that seemed the most storagehardware related to me. This is going to be a long one, but I try to describe my problem as precise as possible and provide as much as information as I can. Pleas also notice that this is my first problem description or forum post in english ever. I am sorry for incorrect spelling or formulation.
Short story how my system was "patched up" (skip if not interested):
Things were becoming a bit untidy here with 4 old machines and a Raspberry running 24/7. My current setup consumes a lot of energy and produces a great deal of noise and heat too. So I took a spare Intel DZ77GA-70K that lay around here for several month, popped in two 8-GB RAM-Sticks (Kingston HyperX Blu) and ordered my self a Intel Xeon E3-1240V2 and SSD. After setting up the hardware I ran RAM-Test and a CPU-Stresstest to make sure every thing is fine and proceeded with installing vSphere 5.1. Up to that point every thing went well. After installation I found that only one of the two onboard NIC's is working. There are two different chips on the board one is a Intel 82579v which doesnt work, the other is a Intel 82574L which works fine. I can live with that, I need to install some additional NIC's anyway. While going over the whole thing how to set up my VM's and distribute the services amongst them, I noticed that a redundant datastore would be a nice thing. So in case I am on vacation or something like that, a trivial thing like disk failure can't bring the whole network down. I consulted the HCL and saw that the LSI MegaRaid SAS 9240-8i is supported by vSphere 5.1. Because I will never use more than 4 drives I chose its little brother the LSI MegaRaid SAS 9240-4i. Even though it's not on the HCL I thought this would work, because the card is based on the same chip it's only missing a second connector. Well... it's NOT working.
The problem:
After I installed the raid controller, I tried to boot the system several times. Every time it hangs at "loading module megaraid_sas..." When I remove the card I can boot normally. As fare as I understand the output on the vmkernel log it found the card and it states "PCI: driver megaraid_sas is looking for devices" some lines later "INIT adapter done". That's the last useful message I get from the machine. And as far as i can tell it doesnt seem that something went wrong After that it periodically prints some USB-related stuff, but I don't think it has something to do with my problem. I have attached a picture of the vmkernel screen on boot. I very much liked to provide you with the full bootlog, but I was not able to figure out a way to "recover" logs from a faild boot attempt. After encountering this problem I did the following things, after every step I tried to boot the machine and it failed
- BIOS update.
- Installed the latest update: ESXi510-201303001
- I flashed the card with the latest firmeware from the LSI-Website (Using Knoppix and the MegaCli provided by LSI as RPM-Package)
- I pulled the latest driver from the LSI-Website an installed the VIB on the machine. (temporarlly removed the raid controller)
- Installed a the latest update some days later: update-from-esxi5.1-5.1_update01 (temporarlly removed the raid controller)
I have read posts from other people who got the card working out of the box or they got it working with flashing the card and updating the driver. I am a little bit at loss now.
At the moment I can see two major problems with my setup. First: The Mobo is not on the HCL. Second: There are no disks connected to the raid controller yet and no arrays configured at the moment, because the SAS-to-SATA cable was not shipped with the card and I had to order one. As for the first problem: the board boots fine without the raid controller, so it should not be a problem. For the second problem: I don't believe that missing disks should stop a raid controller (or its drivers) from working.
Does anyone have any idea what to do? Selling the card and buy an other one is only my last option. If any additional information is required pleas ask for it. Thank you in advance for any help.
Hardware setup
- Intel DZ77GA-70K
- Intel Xeon E3-1240V2
- 2x8GB RAM Kingston HyperX Blu (KHX16C10B1BK2/16X)
- M4 crucial 128 GB SSD
- Seasonic 400W Fanless PSU
- Zotac Nvidia 610GT (temporally for installation and troubleshooting)
- LSI MegaRaid SAS 9240-4i