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PowerEdge HotSwap RAID ESXI
If I have a SATA drive in one of the internal Sata Ports, and install ESXi on the drive. I should be able to boot to the non-hot swap Sata Harddrive, and enable passthrough on the Hot-Swap Raid PCIE card and use any drive in the Hot Swap as an ESXi virtual machine's OS.
Is there something I am missing so the virtual machine can boot to a Windows Formatted drive located in the hot swap bay?
If there is, can you tell me how to enable the drive to be used for a virtual machine. (Instead of creating a VMDK.)
If there is any confusion, let me know if I need to draw a brief sketch of how I have the configuration running and what I am trying to do.
DELL-Chris H
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November 25th, 2013 06:00
Boltjosh,
What is the server model you are working with? I ask as some of our servers have internal USB slots, and SD cards, where ESXi could be installed. I would need to know the system to know exactly.
Let me know.
BoltJosh
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November 25th, 2013 15:00
I have a PowerEdge T420
I have ESXi on a Sata Drive connected to a Sata Port (Not a HOT-SWAP SAS connector)
I have configured the H310 Hot_Swap controller card to be passthrough enabled
I have edited the virtual machine so the drive is set to passthrough
I am suspecting that there is an ESXi BIOS driver that is probably missing so I am currently checking that out
I could do a few screenshots of the BIOS settings if it would help
BoltJosh
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November 25th, 2013 17:00
I tried to use it as a raw device mapping. Either it is not possible or I entered the commands wrong.
I am currently trying to pass the whole H310 to the VM and have it boot off of the H310, without any success (the 931GB drive is the one with the Windows OS)
I'm still not very much use to ESXi so if you don't mind helping through on getting the drive to be raw without reformatting that would be helpful
Dev Mgr
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November 25th, 2013 17:00
Are you trying to use a disk for Raw Device Mapping, or are you trying to pass the whole H310 on to a VM (and therefor inherently the VM would see any disks attached to the H310)?
Dev Mgr
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November 26th, 2013 13:00
RDM is only supported on SAN disks as far as I know, not on SAS, SATA or (PCI/PCIe) raid controller virtual disks.