Thank you very much Ken and MiniKnight for your thoughts and feedback. It has been very helpful.
First, Ken, your advise to refer to the inside panel of the chasis cover and your drive bay configuration response helped me to nail down the issue. My drive bays are configured as you reported your drive bays are configured.
1-1, 1-2, 1-3, 1-4
2-1, 2-2, 2-3, 2-4
3-1, 3-2, 3-3, 3-4
This drive bay configuration is of'course much different than the drive bay layout diagram in the Dell C6105 Hardware Owner's manual.
After testing all of the bays and cross-referencing with the HARD DRIVES detected in the BOOT section of the BIOS, I discovered that 2 of the 3 drives are detectable and that the other drive is not detectable in any bay. Therefore, my issue is resolved but I am awaiting my 4 other drives to arrive (2 x 1TB and 2 x 320GB) so I will have more drives to work with and test.
I initially tried to find as much documentation on the internet as I could find; however, it wasn't much and required a lot of digging. Dell doesn't recognize the Dell Service Tag number on the chasis. Apparently, there have been a few different configurations for the PowerEdge C6105 cloud server since its inception in 2009. I believe the servers we all acquired on Ebay to be the very earliest model. Mine is configured with the Tyan S8208 system board (which I have been able to find a spec sheet for but no real documentation from Dell on the server) and the Opteron 2419 EE processors.
Some links I used include (outside of this forum of'course):
http://www.tyan.com/datasheets/d_S8208.pdf
TYAN - Download Manuals: TYAN (S8208)
TYAN - Download Drivers: TYAN (S8208)
TYAN S8208
PowerEdge C6105 Rack Server Product Details | Dell
Although I gave it a lot of thought, I didn't switch the BIOS from ACHI to RAID yet because I felt my issue was somewhere between the drive bay configuration and the drives themselves.
Thank you again for the great information.
Once the HDDs arrive and I finish out the drive bay testing (and documenting it) I will try to upgrade my esxi 5.1 to 5.5 because of the 32GB RAM limit on the free version of esxi 5.1. Esxi 5.5 RAM limit in the free version is 64GB. I also read that many of the ACHI drivers included in the esxi 5.1 were left out in 5.5 and many people have had problems with their drives not being recognized in 5.5. I also read that if you upgrade from 5.1 to 5.5 then the ACHI drivers would be retained so I will give it a go.
First, Ken, your advise to refer to the inside panel of the chasis cover and your drive bay configuration response helped me to nail down the issue. My drive bays are configured as you reported your drive bays are configured.
1-1, 1-2, 1-3, 1-4
2-1, 2-2, 2-3, 2-4
3-1, 3-2, 3-3, 3-4
This drive bay configuration is of'course much different than the drive bay layout diagram in the Dell C6105 Hardware Owner's manual.
After testing all of the bays and cross-referencing with the HARD DRIVES detected in the BOOT section of the BIOS, I discovered that 2 of the 3 drives are detectable and that the other drive is not detectable in any bay. Therefore, my issue is resolved but I am awaiting my 4 other drives to arrive (2 x 1TB and 2 x 320GB) so I will have more drives to work with and test.
I initially tried to find as much documentation on the internet as I could find; however, it wasn't much and required a lot of digging. Dell doesn't recognize the Dell Service Tag number on the chasis. Apparently, there have been a few different configurations for the PowerEdge C6105 cloud server since its inception in 2009. I believe the servers we all acquired on Ebay to be the very earliest model. Mine is configured with the Tyan S8208 system board (which I have been able to find a spec sheet for but no real documentation from Dell on the server) and the Opteron 2419 EE processors.
Some links I used include (outside of this forum of'course):
http://www.tyan.com/datasheets/d_S8208.pdf
TYAN - Download Manuals: TYAN (S8208)
TYAN - Download Drivers: TYAN (S8208)
TYAN S8208
PowerEdge C6105 Rack Server Product Details | Dell
Although I gave it a lot of thought, I didn't switch the BIOS from ACHI to RAID yet because I felt my issue was somewhere between the drive bay configuration and the drives themselves.
Thank you again for the great information.
Once the HDDs arrive and I finish out the drive bay testing (and documenting it) I will try to upgrade my esxi 5.1 to 5.5 because of the 32GB RAM limit on the free version of esxi 5.1. Esxi 5.5 RAM limit in the free version is 64GB. I also read that many of the ACHI drivers included in the esxi 5.1 were left out in 5.5 and many people have had problems with their drives not being recognized in 5.5. I also read that if you upgrade from 5.1 to 5.5 then the ACHI drivers would be retained so I will give it a go.
. My brother has a 4p G34 board....but the costs for this setup is to much for me at this point. DDR3 RAM costs a lot more...plus the CPU's are still a bit pricey. I have looked at the C32 socket as well. These newer generation boards/chipsets are still more than I want to spend at this point. If these 3-node systems run full power under 400 watts with just one hard drive and 16GIG of ram per node. I think I could live with that at around $350. Down the road I will probably grab some 8425 HE processors for my current setup. Other folks with the same setup as me (4P Supermicro board-naked) are pulling around 350 watts total power running these 2.1 Ghz chips. That still runs about 7 watts per 1000 mhz of processing power though. So possibly this 3 node system is a better value in that department. Hopefully Kens numbers were with his CPU's running at the 1800 Mhz clock. Or if someone else has checked their power usage that would be awesome. I know that it obviously will defer depending on the amount of RAM and Drives in use. I would probably opt for some 2.5" drives or SSD to bring down the power a little bit from what is stock on these units. I think I looked the specs up on the drives that come with these and I think they ran around 10-12 watts...somewhere's in that department.