New User - Help Needed

[Monty_UK]

Hi

I am totally new to servers and VM generation but I am trying to learn the basics

I have a Dell R720 with 8 drives installed controlled through a PERC H710P

4 virtual drives were set up through the raid controller and I also installed a SSD in place of the optical drive for booting purposes

So EXSI 7.0 is installed and I then installed open media vault - when I created the VM i created a 1TB virtual disk and all went ok until I wanted to use some of the other hardware for shared storage - in OMV I can only see the 1TB drive I generated and not the others

How do I fix this .....hopefully someone can explain a solution in layman's terms

thanks in advance

Monty

 

[das1996]

The basic concept is VM's only have access to hardware you assign them.

Depending on application it may be a better idea to allow the vm direct access to the storage than through VMFS.

 

[Spartacus]

and all went ok until I wanted to use some of the other hardware for shared storage

what do you mean but this? you added more virtual disks to the OMV virtual machine, expanded the 1tb virtual disk, or what?

 

[Monty_UK]

No, when i originally configured the server before EXSI was installed, I created 4 virtual disks using the raid controller in the R720

I installed ESXI and used one of the disks to create a data store - I then installed open media vault.

When inside OMV I can only see the allocated space I created for OMV - if I look at storage / disks nothing is listed

I realise that EXSI has not passed use of any more disks to OMV and need to know how to set that up. Not sure if the Perc 710 I have is an issue for this as I only have one disk controller

Hope this makes sense - apologies I am not familiar with the technology

 

[Spartacus]

So the H710p is part of the issue, but let me start with while people do this and its possible, I don't recommend it personally unless you don't care about the data going on it.
My opinion is if you want local storage other than the OS drive on vmware, it should be for vsan, my 2 cents aside.

Normally what you would need to do is passthrough the remaining disks to the OMV virtual machine.
But since you made the omv os as a vmdk you're pretty locked into using it on vmware anyway.
So option 1 is you 'could' just create 3 additional datastores and allocate 3 more 1tb virtual disks (one on each datastore).

The way that it should be done is device raw mapping, heres a few kbs and an article on doing so:

VMware Knowledge Base

kb.vmware.com

VMware Knowledge Base

kb.vmware.com

How to passthrough SATA drives directly on VMWare ESXI 6.5 as RDMs

How to passthrough SATA drives directly on VMWare ESXI 6.5 as RDMs - tutorial.md

gist.github.com

However if OMV is like unraid/ZFS/freenas it definitely prefers it-mode which would require a fw flash of the H710P, but if you don't have or want that, then setting individual drives in their own raid 0 virtaul disk in the H710p for each disk would be the only other way (without getting a second HBA), the H710P does not do non-raid disk configurations.