LSI 9265-8i & VMware ESXi (health monitoring, MegaRAID UI in a VM, & CacheCade 2.0)

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Paul Braren

New Member
Nov 10, 2012
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Wethersfield, CT
TinkerTry.com
Amazing site & forum, glad I found it, from listening to this podcast actually:
http://homeservershow.com/the-home-server-show-183.html

Here's some articles I created about my LSI-9265-8i RAID controller, seen below. I'm hoping others with 92xx controllers and VMware ESXi 5.1 find some value within. I'm always on the lookout for mistakes I may have made, or better ways to do things, so constructive forum feedback greatly appreciated. Ultimately, I'm trying to remove the hassle, sharing resolution to numerous hurtles I had with my own implementation, on commodity/affordable consumer-class gear in my successful home-build called vZilla, which I realize was looking for trouble, but also proved to be a great learning experience for me ;-)

How to make ESXi 5.1 see the health of an LSI 9265-8i RAID controller and array (seems to work with all 92xx controllers)
ESXi 5.1 host with LSI 92xx RAID adapter can run a VM with fully functional MegaRAID Storage Manager UI, here’s how
The reasoning behind vZilla’s use of the LSI 9265-8i RAID Controller (hint: SSD for RAID5 read-and-write caching)
And more:
http://tinkertry.com/category/storage

FYI, I'm still having some implementation issues with SSDs and CacheCade 2.0 Pro. I will write those up as well, with some help from LSI Technical Support (which has been slow). I'll probably do better posting those concerns
 
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Jeggs101

Well-Known Member
Dec 29, 2010
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Are you asking a question? Are you trying to let others know something or just creating backlinks? 1 post and a bunch of links to a personal blog.
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
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Are you asking a question? Are you trying to let others know something or just creating backlinks? 1 post and a bunch of links to a personal blog.
Hey now. Everyone has to start somewhere. I did something similar years ago with STH.

Hi Paul, I have seen your site previously. Good stuff. Very similar reason as to why I started STH years ago. Feel free to e-mail or PM me to chat sometime. We do have some threads on the 9265-8i and similar cards on here.
 

Paul Braren

New Member
Nov 10, 2012
22
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Wethersfield, CT
TinkerTry.com
Dang, was afraid it would be seen only as link bait, and I totally understand Jegg101's concern.

I did believe my title of my articles were quite clear in their content. I was merely hoping to actually save folks time and trouble, given the great deal of time and effort I went through to pioneer getting the technical work completed, to then put those blog posts together. I'm not selling anything. And I even tried to help LSI with their processes a bit as well, reducing their support calls for this frequent question they were getting:
http://kb.lsi.com/KnowledgebaseArticle16602.aspx
always trying to help other folks out.

Anyhow, I was also feeling out whether this forum might be a good place to post my concerns about LSI support, should my ongoing efforts to resolve some technical issues with them ultimately fail.

Sorry if my intentions weren't transparent enough, and if I broke any rules or guidelines. Thanks Patrick for stepping in, and genuinely sorry I added to your workload today, and I appreciate your offers.
 

mobilenvidia

Moderator
Sep 25, 2011
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Very in depth Cachecade stuff, I like it :)

Now if only I could get CC to work on the M5016
works a treat on the LSI9261 with the trial key

And the ASRock F11 boot to get to the WebBIOS took me a wee while to work that out on my P55 also
 
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survive

New Member
Apr 19, 2012
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1
Hi Paul,

Your guide on how to make ESXi 5.1 see the health of LSI controllers is what prompted me to pick up an IBM M5014 that was posted here. All in all it worked out to be a great deal all around for me and I can't see how the pointers to your guides wouldn't be a good fit here.

-Will
 

survive

New Member
Apr 19, 2012
21
0
1
Hi Paul,

Your guide on how to make ESXi 5.1 see the health of LSI controllers is what prompted me to pick up an IBM M5014 that was posted here. All in all it worked out to be a great deal all around for me and I can't see how the pointers to your guides wouldn't be a good fit here.

-Will
 

Patrick

Administrator
Staff member
Dec 21, 2010
12,511
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Anyhow, I was also feeling out whether this forum might be a good place to post my concerns about LSI support, should my ongoing efforts to resolve some technical issues with them ultimately fail.

Sorry if my intentions weren't transparent enough, and if I broke any rules or guidelines. Thanks Patrick for stepping in, and genuinely sorry I added to your workload today, and I appreciate your offers.
All within rules. Glad you are joining in the conversation Paul.
 

mobilenvidia

Moderator
Sep 25, 2011
1,956
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63
New Zealand
FYI, I'm still having some implementation issues with SSDs and CacheCade 2.0 Pro. I will write those up as well, with some help from LSI Technical Support (which has been slow). I'll probably do better posting those concerns
What issues are you having, my RAID0 Cachecade array with the 6x RAID6 spindle drives have not given any issues except one.
You have to remove the Cachecade array if you ever plan to shift controllers, if you do not then the import goes horribly wrong and you can loose the main array.
LSI need to fix how this is imported and fix the ability to remove the Cachecade array when importing foreign config without also removing the foreign config for the Main array.
It all looks like a work in progress from LSI at the moment.
 

DBayPlaya2k3

Member
Nov 9, 2012
72
4
8
Houston
Paul,

Your site helped me tremendiously with my whitebox implementation.

I have been following it for a few weeks now and like you i just found about about this forum the other day as well.

In fact I planned on sending you a message on your blog with some pictures and specs for my whitebox which i just finished building a few days ago.

A lot of the parts i picked came because of your recommendations.

Check out my parts list - https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AhFarcJDQ74UdG9oQXpjZlV6Z0xLb0lMZW1oS3pjaVE

Dang, was afraid it would be seen only as link bait, and I totally understand Jegg101's concern.

I did believe my title of my articles were quite clear in their content. I was merely hoping to actually save folks time and trouble, given the great deal of time and effort I went through to pioneer getting the technical work completed, to then put those blog posts together. I'm not selling anything. And I even tried to help LSI with their processes a bit as well, reducing their support calls for this frequent question they were getting:
http://kb.lsi.com/KnowledgebaseArticle16602.aspx
always trying to help other folks out.

Anyhow, I was also feeling out whether this forum might be a good place to post my concerns about LSI support, should my ongoing efforts to resolve some technical issues with them ultimately fail.

Sorry if my intentions weren't transparent enough, and if I broke any rules or guidelines. Thanks Patrick for stepping in, and genuinely sorry I added to your workload today, and I appreciate your offers.
 

DBayPlaya2k3

Member
Nov 9, 2012
72
4
8
Houston
mobilenvidia:
So glad you shared your experiences with us here.
Great time to thank you for that fantastic guide/monsterpiece you called "LSI RAID Controller and HBA Complete Listing Plus OEM Models":
http://forums.servethehome.com/show...ete-Listing-Plus-OEM-Models&highlight=9265-8i
can't thank you enough!

I also had some issues with Cachecade 2.0 and ESXI but thankfully I was able to figure it out with some help from LSI.

I think the issues you are having if I remember correctly from your blog is that you can do read caching but your write cache setting is grayed out.


Well funny enough I also had a problem but much worse. I picked two intel 520 SSD's (which would be connected to the raid controller) for my cachecade volume and two intel 330 SSD's for just plain O/S volumes (not to be connected to the raid controller).

Well when everything was done I followed the LSI and also your instructions to install the LSI VIB for health monitoring of the raid volume. Well once installed the health monitoring never showed up at all.

I also was never able to monitor the LSI controller from the Mega Raid Storage Manager either. The ESXi host would never show up on the network scan no matter which options were picked.

I even went as far as to install older VIB files and the Russian script file to take broadcasts and turn them into uni-cast nothing worked.

I finally called LSI and then also had no clue why the MSM would not show up as it should but told me about a compatibility issue between the LSI card and the Intel 520 SSD's.

Apparently according to them if the SSD's were connected to the LSI card then the health monitoring in vmware would not show up. The guy I spoke with worked in their atlanta support center.

He said he had a customer that had an issue similar and they had worked on it for a solid month until the figured it out.

He also told me that the MSM should work no matter what as long as I was using a current version.

Once I got home I removed the Intel 520 SSD's booted the ESXI box and boom like magic everything worked. The health status showed up and the ESXI host now showed up to be managed by the MSM.

If i put the 520 back on the raid controller then the problems came right back.

So in the end I ended up using the 330 SSDs for Caching (which work fine btw) and I am using the 520's for just boot volumes for some VM's.

The funny thing about it all is the reasons i picked the Intel 520's was because it was on LSI's supported hardware PDF.

Appreantly it is supported but there is a bug specific with the VIB and Vmware.

If I was using a windows host with the 520's as Cache apparently it would have worked just fine.

LSI is aware of the bug and said it would be fixed in the next VIB file due probably sometime in December.
 

Paul Braren

New Member
Nov 10, 2012
22
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3
Wethersfield, CT
TinkerTry.com
DBayPlaya2k3, thank you so much for sharing your complete saga, great info, and great detail! I will soon be sharing mine, once I give LSI a fair shake to go over some of my issues, verifying what I say is technically accurate. They've just been way behind lately, but frankly, so have I.

At the moment, even bigger priority is getting a working config, with write caching on my RAID5 working again. So amazed you caught that comment, buried in a discussion. Exactly the reasons your story is so interesting to me, of course, gives me some insight.

mobilenvidia, I had just checked for new firmware 3 days ago, and what do you know, there it is from 2 days ago:
http://www.lsi.com/support/Pages/Download-Results.aspx?keyword=9265
and fixed up my LSI subscription, so I won't miss updates again.

I know what I'll be doing to my 9265-8i very soon. Thank you!
 
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Paul Braren

New Member
Nov 10, 2012
22
6
3
Wethersfield, CT
TinkerTry.com
DBayPlaya2k3, forgot to mention, wow, thank you so much for the parts lists and details above! Very much looking forward to hearing more about how your install goes, particular that promising Intel NIC, and the LSI 9265-8i, of course.
 
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Paul Braren

New Member
Nov 10, 2012
22
6
3
Wethersfield, CT
TinkerTry.com
New FW is out 23.9.0-0018 released a couple of days ago.
Update history in M5016 experiences thread.

Might be of help.
Unfortunately, no joy, seen in this YouTube video I just uploaded:
http://youtu.be/Doqg52KviF8

Still unable to turn on write caching, with this new 23.9.0-0018 (aka 1998) firmware.

Well, not with my 256GB Samsung 830 anyway, which is admittedly not on LSI's list of compatible SSDs.

I'll also let LSI support know of course.

I suppose it's possible that their firmware is intentionally preventing users from turning on the write cache on a RAID5, if it doesn't detect a known-compatible drive.

Of course, we're all hoping to find somebody with a fast and affordable SSD who actually has CacheCade 2.0 with read and write both working well with their 9265-8i RAID5, ideally using something affordable and "blessed" by LSI support folks as well.
 
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Paul Braren

New Member
Nov 10, 2012
22
6
3
Wethersfield, CT
TinkerTry.com
...
Of course, we're all hoping to find somebody with a fast and affordable SSD who actually has CacheCade 2.0 with read and write both working well with their 9265-8i RAID5, ideally using something affordable and "blessed" by LSI support folks as well.
Naturally, that sort of community effort to resolve issues is part of the tremendous value of forums like this, which are time consuming to create/moderate/maintain, but so worthwhile.

It's interesting that a vendor as big as LSI doesn't seem inclined to run their own forum, choosing to go with kb (wiki/faq) style support only:
http://kb.lsi.com

Glad that STHForums exists!
 

c912039

New Member
Apr 25, 2012
8
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Hi Paul,

its David from Australia - slightly different config, but I have CacheCade 2.0 working in write mode.
Ive got it on a 9260-8i using a SanDisk Extreme 240G SSD.
As mentioned to you in private correspondence via Tinkertry that one side affect I do have is any scheduled consistency checks when CacheCade is active, will cause the adapater to crash.
 

mobilenvidia

Moderator
Sep 25, 2011
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New Zealand
The 9260, or any SAS2108 capable of CacheCade 2.0 has read/write working for sometime now.
The SAS2208 took a bit longer to even get write added to the Firmware (I think LSI call it v2.1), there were/are some problems by the looks of it implementing it on the dual core ROC.

I wonder if LSI will ever get it working properly for the SAS2208, or roll out the SAS3108 and have it working on that and forget about older cards.
I find it a bit naff selling a product with a feature (it's top end) that doesn't even work.
 

mobilenvidia

Moderator
Sep 25, 2011
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New Zealand
About to start a consistency check in 10min.
Using LSI9261 with FW 12.12.0-00126, RAID0 Cachecade pro v2.0 setup, RAID6 Array.
Lets see what happens