Hi,
I'm currently in the middle off a hardware upgrade for my home ESXi 5.1 (u1) machine, which I use for testing and training towards certifications (mostly microsoft)
The specs for the machine are the following:
CPU: Intel Core i5 4670 (Haswell)
Mainboard: Gigabyte GA-Z87MX-D3H
MEM: Kingston HyperX KHX1600C10D3B1K2/16G
Bootdisk: Western Digital Raptor WD740ADFD, 73GB
VMstorage: Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD753LJ, 750GB (<- will be removed when this problem is solved)
I was able to pickup a LSI/3Ware 9650SE-8LPML + 4 Western Digital Green WD20EARS, 2TB for a good price to add some extra iops in the mix.
The controller installed just fine, created a RAID 10 volume using the bios interface of the card. Installed the official driver in VmWare for it, but it's not showing up under storage devices, but the driver is listed. When I connect to the machien via ssh and run lspci I can see it reconigzes the controller and even addresses it with an id:
00:03:00.0 Mass storage controller: 3ware Inc 9650SE SATA-II RAID PCIe <- without driver loaded
00:03:00.0 Mass storge controller: 3ware 9650SE 3ware 9650SE [vmhba1] <- with driver loaded
When I try to manualy add the device to the storagelist I get the follwing error:
~ # esxcli storage core adapter rescan --adapter vmhba1
Invalid adapter specified or unable to get adapter 'vmhba1'
The devices works perfectly under both Windows 7 and Linux on the same machine, but VmWare remains a problem. I've also tried setting the internal (Lynx) sata ports from AHCI to IDE mode, since ESXi so thos as a raid controller aswell, but it makes no difference.
Other people have had succes with creating a cutom iso with the driver preloaded, but this did't work either. Others had succes with ESXi 5.0, but that version doesn't recognise the onboard controller (for the bootdisk) or the 3ware. Even a custom build ESXi from LSI itself had the same problem.
I'm bummed out that although this controller is on the HCL, it's still giving me such a hard time installing it... and I need to move on with my certification.
PS: Both the mainboard and the card have the latest firmware releases (I've even tried a few older FW's)