Looking for good SAS RAID controller for use in ESXi 6.7

nka · February 27, 2019

I'm currently trying to replace the P410 on a SuperMicro X9DR3-F. I'm "pimping" the spare server (more ram, more disc and ESXi 6.7), but I'm having problems with the LSI 9211-8i. I can install ESXi on it, but can't see the status of the disk (example image : https://i.stack.imgur.com/wuFcj.png ). Searching around, seems it's a known problem and Broadcom haven released the SMI-S for 6.7 yet.

Long story short... is the LSI 9361-8i working fine in ESXi 6.7 ? Cause I would buy this. Or other suggestions ?

I searched a lot and it's unclear what is working fine or not... even if it's in the HCL.

Thanks !

scottyseng · February 28, 2019

23 hours ago, nka said:

I'm currently trying to replace the P410 on a SuperMicro X9DR3-F. I'm "pimping" the spare server (more ram, more disc and ESXi 6.7), but I'm having problems with the LSI 9211-8i. I can install ESXi on it, but can't see the status of the disk (example image : https://i.stack.imgur.com/wuFcj.png ). Searching around, seems it's a known problem and Broadcom haven released the SMI-S for 6.7 yet.

Long story short... is the LSI 9361-8i working fine in ESXi 6.7 ? Cause I would buy this. Or other suggestions ?

I searched a lot and it's unclear what is working fine or not... even if it's in the HCL.

Thanks !

@leadeater Any experience with this? To me I would think that ESXi wouldn't be able to know the health status of the arrays on the RAID card since that's usually kept hidden to only the RAID card. I guess you would have to get MegaRAID storage manager to see the health from the RAID card?

nka · February 28, 2019

If you want, you can just suggest me a "good card" (no need for vault or cache) around maybe 500$ ?

I got 8 x SAS 12 Gbps drives, but would be okay if the card is 6 Gbps, as long as it's ESXI 6.7 friendy !

leadeater · February 28, 2019

1 hour ago, scottyseng said:

@leadeater Any experience with this? To me I would think that ESXi wouldn't be able to know the health status of the arrays on the RAID card since that's usually kept hidden to only the RAID card. I guess you would have to get MegaRAID storage manager to see the health from the RAID card?

@nka

I would expect the generation of card that superseded it is correctly supported, LSI 9311

nka · February 28, 2019

@leadeater look like you are right... I see one here on the screenshot of his 2018 lab (same chipset) : https://www.vladan.fr/lab/

edit : Oops, for vSAN only. After a little bit of reading, I think that no LSI card will work in ESXi 6.7 as now, since there's no working SMI-S. But this card might work in 6.5 until it's fixed (the 9211-8i wasnt able to boot in 6.5).

There's no "new card", so I'll order one used and try it !

benny_r_t_2 · March 1, 2019

Edit: @nka have you tried updating ESXi host to 6.7 update 1? What is your ESXi build#?

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Wow i hope that's not the case regarding lsi controllers not working with 6.7. I've not purchased my sas controllers but i was about too. i am setting up a new esxi 6.7 host but it's a work in progress, nothing critical on it yet.

At the moment I'm using the Intel controller on the motherboard's c620 chipset (supermicro X11DPI-NT) with no problems, but I'm also not using RAID array. Simply one datastore per physical drive at the moment, then i assign each Linux vm three virtual scsi controllers and each of those i allocate portions from physical hdds from the datastores. Then in the vm i use Linux logical volume groups (LVMs) spanning the three vHDDs. This stripes the filesystems in the three LVMs across three physical drives, kinda like a raid 0.

Sorry i digressed. Anyway, I'm still looking for sas controller and very surprised if an lsi 9211 or 9261 wouldn't work with ESXi 6.7 but I'm going to research and ask around. Maybe I'll need to step back to 6.5

scottyseng · March 1, 2019

1 hour ago, benny_r_t_2 said:

Sorry i digressed. Anyway, I'm still looking for sas controller and very surprised if an lsi 9211 or 9261 wouldn't work with ESXi 6.7 but I'm going to research and ask around. Maybe I'll need to step back to 6.5

The controller would work, but the OP's issue is getting the controller to report array / drive heath status within ESXi / Vcenter.

I run an LSI 9261 currently on my home server, but I have to have MegaRAID Storage Manager running to see the status of the drives on the controller.

nka · March 4, 2019

@benny_r_t_2 As @scottyseng said, ESXi is working fine, but I'm just unable to see the drive status in ESXi... Look like Broadcom didnt release the "working" SMI-S" for ESXi 6.7 yey.

@scottyseng It's most likely what I will do so I can manage it, but it's not detected, even by StoreCLI (work fine on Linux). I'm ordering 9361-8i, VMWare said it should work fine with lsi_mr3 divers. Let's see !