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One of our small offices was in need of a small server to perform certain tasks. Because the noise and size an of a regular server I went with the HP ProLiant Microserver Gen8 G1610T. I expected it to be great, having read a lot of reviews and personally owned with N40L microserver as a home test lab.

But now I have the server at home and setting up ESXi on it and am running into problems. I installed ESXi(5.5) on the internal micro SD card slot, ESXi boots and runs great no lag or something.

Next i put in one 160GB 7200RPM drive (the 2x 3TB drives have not arrived yet), and created 1 logical volume with the internal HP Dynamic Smart Array B120i Controller and used the following settings:

  • Rebuild priority = medium
  • surface scan priority = 3s
  • idle physical drive cache state = enabled
  • read cache size = 128mb
  • Fault tolorance = RAID 0
  • Strip size = 256KB
  • sectors/track = 32 caching= enabled

But now when I add the datastore to the ESXi and install a VM like Windows Server 2008 R2, the virtual machine is very slow and if I look at task manager, I see the disk is being used 100% almost always.

So hope someone can help me because I'm a bit lost and do not have much experience with RAID. And I did use the HP custom ESXi installer so the drivers are there (I hope).

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3 Answers 3

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The issue you are having is due to a RAID controller that isn't on VMware's Hardware Compatibility List.

I've had the same issues before. VMware is very picky.

http://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php

Good luck.

~ M

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I have server HP DL320e Gen8 v2. It is necessary use HP version of ESXi. There are all drivers provided by HP in Offline Bundle.

DOC - HP ESXi Offline Bundle

HP Servers Support

To check HP drivers you can reach ESXi console or SSH and check for drives version.

esxcli software vib list | grep hp

I had similar performance issue on server HP ProLiant ML310e Generation 8 with HP Dynamic Smart Array B120i Controller. I add HP Smart Array P222/512MB and resolve all performance issue. Or you can use HP Smart Array P421 to add more drives inside.

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    Why has this answer been downvoted? Isn't this a perfectly valid answer? HP writes on their website "The drivers for the new network and storage controllers in the servers are integrated in the HP Customized image and are not part of the generic ESXi image that is distributed by VMware". This means that for HP servers, the HP image should be used. The described server is also on HP's list of servers requiring their custom image as outlined on h17007.www1.hp.com/us/en/enterprise/servers/supportmatrix/…. Upvoting to at least giving this answer "0".
    – sbrattla
    Dec 2, 2015 at 8:55
  • Dynamic Smart Array B120i has very pore performance. I've moved all disks to better adapter Smart Array P222. Feb 17, 2017 at 21:06
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Had the same issue... you just need to install the HP version of ESXi... Search google for HP Custom Image for VMware ESXi 6.0, login with your HP account and hey presto!

Yo may need to register if you do not have an account :o)

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