I've been struggling with a new VMware server we recently got. Everything installed fine, but I'm unable to manage the RAID card. The built-in monitoring works (kind of), but I need to manage it, not just monitor it. LSI support has been little help, just like their documentation, evidently.
I've installed MegaRAID Storage Manager (MSM) in different ways, on different machines, followed all sorts of directions, but the host never gets discovered in the application. Has anyone gotten this to work in ESXi 4.1?
Alternatively, what is a good SAS RAID card that is manageable in ESXi 4.1? One with RAID 6. I may be sending this server back (or at least the RAID card) if I can't get it working very soon.
Thanks, Josh
I think you can only do it with vendor support. A while ago we had 3Ware RAID board and 3Ware (now LSI by the way) provided oem.taz file for installation on VMware ESXi. Once it was installed it would provide web management gui for the card. I think it may work the same with your LSI board if LSI is willing to provides version of their management tool for VMware.
However, this approach was causing us too much troubles with upgrades and we ended up with all our VMware ESXi servers running without internal storage, i.e. they boot either from USB flash or from small SSD and all data stores are on external array accessible via NFS/iSCSI (NFS is our favorite so far).