Hi Guy's

Hope you can help. I bought 3 of these cs24-nv7 for a home lab. Seems like a good deal but I'm somewhat of a newbie when it comes to building stuff from scratch.(Used a VMware lab for a while but already configured.

So I created a usb boot and loaded to a sata drive and when ESXi boots it hangs at the last step. and then states usbarbitrator started and just sits there. I found this doc that states i need to do the following. The probelm is I can't figure out how to run this!

 To stop the USB arbitration service:

   1.Run the “ps aux|grep usb” command to check if the USB arbitration service
     is running.
   2.Run the “chkconfig usbarbitrator off” command to prevent the USB
     arbitration service from starting during boot.
   3.After the USB arbitrator service is stopped, reboot the server to allow the
     Inventory collector to run. <ADMIN NOTE: Broken link has been removed from this post by Dell>

If I disable the boot drive and let the server boot thru to the prompt, nothing works. Do I need to do that from the ESXi prompt?

Thanks for the help.

Hi Tony,

It is actually timing out on the sata connections. If you go to alt + f12 you will see a huge list or errors spamming by about lost connection to xxxx. I spent
quite some time trying to fix this but I never came up with a good answer. I ended up installing esxi 5.1 on a thumb drive and adding a sata drive for
storage on each 1u computer and it is now running normally. If you let it sit for about 40 minutes it will finally time out and load (seemingly properly) if
you do want to keep esxi installed on the sata drive. Obviously not recommended.

My setup is 2 cs24-nv7 (the 1u) running esxi 5.1 and 1 FS12-NV7 (2u) running freenas . The 12 bays on the FS12-NV7 I am using a adaptec 51245 12 port
controller and running 2 240gb SSD and 10 3tb seagate drives using ZFS. My new problem is my FS12-NV7 is overheating and causing random lockups. The fans run all the time and are very, very loud. (The one FS12-NV7 makes more noise than an entire rack of 18 Dell PE 710s under heavy load) The onboard temp monitors do not seem to report to freenas or esxi. In the 1us I have added dual port gigabit nics (intel) and in the 2u I have a quad port nic (also intel) for iscsi traffic
between the systems. I have about 10 virtual machines that are running ok for the moment but it is not super stable. It took me ages to get iscsi, network failover, and vm motion to work properly.

I was hoping for an enterprise level test bed but I have had to fight problem after problem with these systems. I am beginning to see clearly why you
sometimes bite the bullet and just buy hardware with support contracts and clear drivers.  On the other hand I have learned a great deal while conquering the problems.

If someone has gotten further than me I would love to hear about it. Especially on making the FS12-NV7 less noisy and more stable.  Seriously considering selling my entire setup because it is simply too noisy to power up long term in my home.

I forgot that non-raid sata is not supported. I tried loading to USB and keep getting errors as well. Did you use the ESXi 5.1 iso from VMware? I just downloaded the 5.0 build from Dell to try as well. Maybe I had a bad USB stick?

What I was planning on doing is use my DROBO b800i for storage(used it before and worked great) and then openfiler to cluster the sata drives that are local on the server.

So I figured out that I was using too cheap usb drives... Go Figure....Got a couple of better usb sticks and ESXi works....The onboard NICS seem to be working too. I was hoping that was the case but was prepared to spend some money on better NICs. I'm going to try and create a Vm on each host running openfiler to create virtual SANs and see what kind of perfomance that thows out instead of the Perc6 cards.

I have a NAS(11tb) but loaded the servers with 4x750gb drives so I figure I should use them.

Thanks for the response.

quick question  my servers are racked up and i hate to pull them while they are running to just check. im trying to find out what the open slots are. i want to buy a dual nic port for them to increase thruput  

thanks!