Connecting MD1000 to a Win 2008 VM on ESXi 5

Do you need the VMs just to be able to use the storage, is there data already on there that you're trying to access, are you needing to give a VM a single disk larger than 2TB, or is there another reason for trying to pass an MD1000 to a VM?

I'm not sure you can do this with a 2950 as there may be certain CPU requirements that didn't become available till later CPU generations (like the R710/R720 or so), but...

You would have to try to pass the PERC5E or PERC6E directly to a (single) VM. If you can get that to work, the VM would see the PERC controller as its own and then see the storage on the MD1000 that is attached. Dell's OpenManage would not work on a VM as it won't recognize the VM as a Dell PowerEdge server.

Hi Dev Mgr, thanks for your reply.

No, i dont want to make the MD as a datastore, i am thinking to make MD visible to OpenManage installed on VM. I have been doing some research online and found that there is a technique called 'passthrough' by which i can achieve this. In order to have this feature enabled, i would need both VTX and VTD featured processor. I have checked my processor config and it does support it however 2950's BIOS doesn't have options to enable it.

i checked the BIOS version and it was on 2.2. Thus i have just now upgraded it to 2.7 and will do the testing. will let you know the update.

Even if you can get the pass-through to work, OpenManage will not be able to manage the unit as OpenManage will only install/work/monitor PowerEdge servers (I've tried on my Precision Workstation's PERC6i and OpenManage wouldn't install.

Maybe there are ways to get around this, or with an old version of OMSA, but I didn't bother trying that.

Edit: If you do manage to pass the raid controller through to the VM, the host will no longer be able to use that storage; it will be fully dedicated to that one VM only.