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I got a new Dell server with a PERC H310 (2 HHD in RAID 1) and a SAS 5/E adapter for a Dell Power vault 4 tape Drive. I installed ESXi 5.5 with a windows 2k8R2 and a Debian virtual machine.

I'm having a lot of troubles with Backup Exec. Sometimes jobs work fine, mos of the time jobs fail and others run very slow and en up being cancel because of the 15 hours limit for the job (Good jobs take only 6 hours). I'm not sure If I set up properly the virtual disks and SCSI adapter for the windows machine, I'm new in esxi.

The SAS 5/E Adapter is detected by esxi as vmhba1:C0:T0:L0. The PERC H310 is detected as vmhba2:C2:T0:L0, vmhba2:C2:T1:L0 and vmhba2:C0:T32:L0 (no sure what this last thing is)

My windows 2k8 R2 virtual machine have three virtual disk with the Virtual Device nodes 0:0,0:3,0:4 and the Tape in 1:0 (also tried with the tape in 0:2 with the same problems)

The Tape Drive was running great in my old server using the same SAS 5/E adapter and the virtual machines HDD I/O speed is fine.

I found this link http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1016407 by I'm still not sure if I set it up ok.

Can the paths be changed manually??

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You may want to consider using PCI passthrough (VMDirectPath) of the SAS HBA to the specific virtual machine that needs it (the Windows server). This essentially gives the Windows VM exclusive access to the tape drive adapter. Ideally, there's a boost in performance.

The VMware guide to accomplish this is located here.

It will require a reboot of the host.

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  • Thanks, I'll try that. But is the Virtual Device Node configured ok or should I change the Tape Drive to a diferent SCSI node?
    – Santi
    Feb 6, 2014 at 13:59

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