More disappointment was in store for my research when I came to partition the disks. I had bought three 1.5TB disks which I intended to mostly deploy as RAID5 which would total around 2.7TB in actual storage. I already knew that ESX4i has a 2TB limit for the maximum size of a single VMFS partition although they can bridge disks using extents to much larger sizes.
Adaptec’s web site lists the 5405 as being capable of multiple LUNs so my strategy was to initially deploy a small 8GB Raid5 LUN for ESX boot, a 96GB Raid0 stripe LUN as VM swap space and 250GB RAID5 for the initial VMs with the rest left available to use as a volume served by FreeNAS as a TimeMachine store for our office laptops.
On booting into the BIOS Adaptec console I started the management console and tried to create the first array. No problems there but when I tried to create the second array the console tells me there are no available to disks to create an array on. Hmm that’s not good because if a physical disk can only be part of one array then my partition plan goes out the window. I decide to format the whole array as a single 2.7TB Raid5 drive and install ESXi this seems to work fine until you realise there it shows only 0.7TB of available storage.
Loosing 2TB was not an option so I start trawling the web for solutions. I raise a ticket with Adaptec about lack of multiple LUNs but 4 days later there is no response. I search the knowledge-base, docs and forums but there is no mention of multiple LUN or multiple array support and the only place it comes up is marketing material as a feature of the card.
Finally I figure I should update the card firmware. There is no mention of multi LUN or array support in any of the revision notes but the strategy worked for the motherboard so I figured I’d give it a go and once a again the fix came from nowhere. Even better the new firmware now supports using an SSD as a hierarchical cache for the array and I have one spare SATA port on the card so this could well be a future upgrade option.
In the meantime I go back to my original disk allocation plan and install ESXi and it all seems to be working great. Happy days.
November 18th, 2009 at 6:21 pm
Any update on how this is running. I am curious as to how well it works.
Thanks,
Scott
November 27th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
If it was not for this posting I would have given up setting up
something similar long time ago. Thank you!!!!!
December 12th, 2009 at 9:13 pm
Scott
As you asked for an update I can tell you that no news is good news. It’s now been running for almost 3 months without a hitch. I am scheduled to power it down just before Christmas to add a couple of extra ethernet controllers but other than that it has been running non-stop since it was setup and has worked like a dream, I could not be happier.
Max…