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VMware with HP P410 RAID controller and non-HP motherboard

Tags:
  • NAS / RAID
  • Storage
  • Hewlett Packard
  • VMware
  • ASrock
October 4, 2014 8:26:59 AM

Hi,

I'm attempting to set up a home lab using ESXi 5.5. I'm from a networking background, so don't have much experience on the server side. Hope you can help. So far I have the following setup:

ASRock q87m VPro Motherboard
Intel i7 4790 CPU
32GB RAM
256GB Samsung SSD (running Windows Server 2012r2)
512GB Samsung SSD (running VMware 5.5 U2)
HP Smart Array P410 with 4 x 4TB WD RED drives

First of all I couldn't get the machine to boot as the HP P410 attempts to initialise before I get chance to change UEFI settings, and it goes into a boot loop. I removed the card and disabled the storage ROM, then rebooted directly into Windows, installed all the HP drivers, upgraded the HP ROM and created a RAID5 array using all 4 WD disks.

I then created a patched version of ESXi 5.5 U2 with the HP P410 driver, installed and booted VMWare and created a VM for Windows Server 2012r2. I used PCI-E passthrough for the HP RAID card, formatted it with NTFS and started to fill it with media. I didn't like the fact that when I enabled PCI-E passthrough I had to dedicate resource to the Windows VM, so other VMs could not use them. A week or so later I enabled a number of features such as Domain Services, DNS etc in Windows and rebooted. The machine came back showing no RAID card, after a few reboots it showed the array as corrupted. I booted from the first drive (pure Windows) and checked using the HP software (which doesn't work in a virtual environment) and the partition was showing as RAW, but with no errors. I tried to get the partition back, but ended up restoring an old partition. Tried drive recovery software and none of the files were recoverable.

Is PCI-E passthrough a bad idea? Could it have caused the corruption?

I have now started again. Created a new array in Windows Server, installed VMware clean and then patched using the HP driver. I've formatted the array within VMware, using VMFS 5.6 (which should support file sizes above 2TB) and it is 10.92 TB in size. The problem is it is showing a maximum file size of 2TB, so I cannot create a virtual disk the full size of the array. I am now at a loss of how to handle this.

The final solution I want to get to is as follows:

Virtualised Windows Server, which will also act as a NAS. This VM will be on permanently and provisioned with all the RAM and CPU capacity, but with none reserved, as well as a second disk the size of the RAID array.

Other VMs will be used as required (for training) and will take resource from the RAM and CPU pool, again nothing reserved.

The disks will be used as follows:
768 GB of SSD storage running VMWare and providing storage for virtual machines.
10.92 TB of storage as a single drive for NAS storage (i.e. media etc)

Does anyone with VMWare experience have any idea of the best and safest way to achieve this?

I was also considering just installing Windows Server and using Hyper-V. At least I will be able to see the status of the array through the HP tools. I would convert any VMWare appliances to Hyper-V using the MS tool. Does anyone see any problems with this. The main vendors I will be virtualising are MS, Cisco, Juniper, F5 and Checkpoint.

Thanks again

Thanks for your help.

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