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Trying to install vmware esxi 5 on a fujitsu S100R5 server (two drive bays).

I have the drives as a hardware RAID 1 array, but vmware is showing the two physical drives at install time.

If i install to one of those drives, the array becomes degraded, and at boot time "no operating system" is displayed, even after rebuild.

As i understand it (this is my first bare metal vmware install) vmware is meant to display the logical array as a drive, and you should install upon this.

I'm kind of out of ideas, has anyone else experienced this ?

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1 Answer

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The S100R5 does have what is called a "fake-RAID" - it is not the same kind as the "proper hardware-RAID" controller where you would see a complete abstraction of your RAID containers / volumes. Instead, fake-RAID relies on operating system drivers to do the work needed for drive synchronization and eventual checksumming. VMWare's drivers will not support this.

You could set up your controller for the use of individual drives instead and install ESXi on one of those or buy a hardware RAID controller, preferably one listed in VMWare's Hardware Compatibility List.

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does vmware support some sort of redundancy internally ? – Sirex Oct 11 '11 at 9:34
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nope, no software RAID in ESXi. BTW: disks without write caches are showing crappy performance with virtualization loads. You really should have a hardware RAID controller with battery-backed write caches to improve that. – syneticon-dj Oct 11 '11 at 9:49
we inherited the S100 server, and also a few S400's. Those are showing much better compatibility to vmware and seemt o have proper raid so ill use one of those instead. Thanks for the insight on the S100, saved me alot of frustration. – Sirex Oct 11 '11 at 10:21

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