3Ware 9650SE with ESXi 5.5

This is definitely an edge case, but if you’ve got a bunch of old 3Ware 9650SE RAID cards laying around, they will work in ESXi 5.5.  You’ll need to either create a custom ISO or add them via SSH after the install.  Adding them post-install is easier for me than making another custom ISO.

I’ve set up 2 ESXi servers (old x58 chipset MBs I had laying around) to do some clustering.  I picked up 5 9650SE RAID cards off of eBay for $55, including cables, and cobbled together some RAID volumes from the stacks of HDDs I had laying around.

I set up my ESXi boxes with a custom ISO I’d created previously that has the Realtec NIC, Intel NIC, and Intel SATA drivers (that’s another post, or look up ESXi-customizer). I was able to get the cards up and working with minimal issues (after I updated the firmware to the most current version…was a puzzle as a couple cards were updated and just worked, then I got stuck with some others and they wouldn’t work at all until the FW was updated)

I then replaced one of the ESXi boxes with an x79 system and could not get the RAID card to work with the existing drivers I had.  Hours and multiple reboots, driver uploads, I found another driver that works from Avago (direct): http://docs.avagotech.com/docs/12349232

You can find it here: http://www.avagotech.com/ –> Support –> Support Documents and Downloads –> Legacy RAID controllers –> 3ware 9650SE-xxxx –> Search –> Driver –> VMware ESXi 5.0 Update 1 for 9650SE/9690SA

Connect to your ESXi server via SSH (you’ll need to enable this first) and use the command:

localcli software vib install -v /vmfs/volumes/datastore-name/scsi-3w-9xxx-2.27.08.036-1OEM.500.0.0.472560.x86_64.vib

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Hyper-V as a vSphere VM/Nested x64 OSes on VMWare ESXi/Workstation 8

I’ve been playing around with the new vSphere 5 Hypervisor (ESXi5) lately and I came across a few cool tricks from virtuallyghetto (http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/2011/07/how-to-enable-support-for-nested-64bit.html):  running x64 VMs on ESXi5 while itself is a VM under Workstation 8 and running VMs under Hyper-V server under ESXi.

Running a Hyper-V VM while Hyper-V is itself a VM under ESXi5 does work, it’s not really something you’d want to do, unless you’re masochistic.  I was able to get Windows 2000 Pro running walking as a VM successfully.  The stability of ESXi seems to be greatly affected by doing this also, since my ESXi host hung at some point overnight.

VMWare vSphere Hypervisor 5

I was excited to try out the new free version of ESXi 5 today on a test system with a Core 2 Quad Q6600. 

I received an ominous message that “VMWare ESXi 5.0 installs on most systems but only systems on VMWare’s compatibility Guide are supported.”  I didn’t think much of it until I got to the next stage of the install and got this message:

“Error(s) <CPU_CORES ERROR: This host has [1] cpu core(s) which is less than recommended [2] cpu cores>”

“(F9) Back                (F11) Reboot”

Game over?  Not quite.  I found a post http://communities.vmware.com/message/1082035#1082035 with an almost identical hardware config referring to the same issue for ESX 3. 

Disable MAX CPUid in the BIOS, installation completed.