Not able to enable passthrough

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new2VM

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Oct 13, 2013
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Hello,

I am trying to install All in One from this location:

napp-it // webbased ZFS NAS/SAN appliance for OmniOS, OpenIndiana and Solaris downloads

When I go to Inventory- <ESXi 5.1 host> - Configutation - Advanced Settings ... I am not able to enable pass through. I am not sure why.

I tried look around for any mistakes in configuration... what I see is that in the summary tab, DirectPath I/O is listed as Not supported with a note "Configuration Issue: The hardware of the host does not support DirectPath I/O"

I have HP ProLiant Micro server.

Can someone help me understand the meaning of this configuration issue? Do I need to enable passthrough to use All in one napp-it ZFS server?
 

gea

Well-Known Member
Dec 31, 2010
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Hello,

I am trying to install All in One from this location:

napp-it // webbased ZFS NAS/SAN appliance for OmniOS, OpenIndiana and Solaris downloads

When I go to Inventory- <ESXi 5.1 host> - Configutation - Advanced Settings ... I am not able to enable pass through. I am not sure why.

I tried look around for any mistakes in configuration... what I see is that in the summary tab, DirectPath I/O is listed as Not supported with a note "Configuration Issue: The hardware of the host does not support DirectPath I/O"

I have HP ProLiant Micro server.

Can someone help me understand the meaning of this configuration issue? Do I need to enable passthrough to use All in one napp-it ZFS server?
HP Microserver (N36-N54) does not support vt-d
You can only use RDM (raw disk mapping) without hotplug and smart features at a reduced performance and reliability.

Only Gen8 Microserver offer VT-d with capable CPUs
 

cptbjorn

Member
Aug 16, 2013
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HP Microserver (N36-N54) does not support vt-d
You can only use RDM (raw disk mapping) without hotplug and smart features at a reduced performance and reliability.

Only Gen8 Microserver offer VT-d with capable CPUs
Which smart features? With RDM to a CentOS VM I can use smartmontools just fine to query the smart data. "Hotplug" is also only broken in that it takes manual steps to swap out a disk; there's no reboot needed for the esx host or the VM...
 

MiniKnight

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Mar 30, 2012
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Such a pain. Worst is that VT-d disabling is done by manufacturers and is usually not a base silicon issue.
 

new2VM

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Oct 13, 2013
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Such a pain. Worst is that VT-d disabling is done by manufacturers and is usually not a base silicon issue.
Hello All,

Thanks for all the replies. Since I posted this question yesterday, I made some headway..

I figured out that passthrough is not suported. So I looked around for help and heavily used from this article:

Creating RDMs on SATA drives

I am planning to use this server I am building for NAS purposes; so I used vmkfstool with -z option. However, I have a 3TB disk and the command failed with following error:

Failed to create virtual disk: The destination file system does not support large files (12)

There is conflicting (at least for me) information on web... some posts say they have done it... some say ESXi 5.1 supports RDM (physical) up to 60 TB... while other posts say 2TB is the limit...

Can some one help clarify? I have ESXi 5.1 and want to install napp-it ZFS; can I use 3TB disk for NFS?

thanks in advance.
 

new2VM

New Member
Oct 13, 2013
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No. I have AMD Turino II N40L processor which does not support VT-d; I am told by HP support folks..
 

new2VM

New Member
Oct 13, 2013
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Hello All,

I thought I found the issue... but still struggling... I made some progress though.

I have two disks in my system. One 250GB that came with the server. The second, 3TB I added.

Initially, I had setup my data store on 250GB disk. When I added the datastore, ESXi, by default assigned VMFS-3. I dont remember if the system did not give the option or I just ignored this ... anyways, I think due to this, I was not able to add any disk more than 2TB.

So I scratched whole thing and added the datastore with VMFS5. I was able to add the 3TB disk to the VM via RDM. But now I am still not able to boot my VM. I get following error when I power on the system:

Cannot open the disk '/vmfs/volumes/525c816e-639d31f2-80c2-e4115b1387b3/RDMs/RDM1P.vmdk' or one of the snapshot disks it depends on.
Failed to lock the file

It is probably due to the following:

When I scratched the whole thing, I configured my datastore on to 3TB disk (by partitioning the disk: 250GB and the rest). I am not sure (now) if that is allowed: meaning can I have a partition on a physical disk for the datastore and use rest of the partition on the same physical for other purposes such as NFS?

I will keep trying... please help

thanks
 

tby

Active Member
Aug 22, 2013
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When I scratched the whole thing, I configured my datastore on to 3TB disk (by partitioning the disk: 250GB and the rest). I am not sure (now) if that is allowed: meaning can I have a partition on a physical disk for the datastore and use rest of the partition on the same physical for other purposes such as NFS?
You're trying to RDM a partition instead of a whole disk? That's definitely not allowed.

If you make the 250GB disk VMFS-5, and create an RDM for the 3TB disk using 'vmkfstools -z' (physical RDM), it ought to work but I don't have any >2TB disks to verify with. Works great for me with a 750GB disk on 5.1/VMFS-5 but obviously that wouldn't expose any >2TB issues.

VMware KB: Frequently Asked Questions on VMware vSphere 5.x for VMFS-5
 

new2VM

New Member
Oct 13, 2013
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Hello everyone!

I am able to boot now. My server is up and ZFS is running.

Summary:

- The main issue seems to be initial configuration of datastore as a VMFS3 that prevented me to add 3 TB RDM. This threw me into all sorts of experiment all of it unnecessary until it lead me to setting this to VMFS5
- Next I made a mistake in creating partition on 3TB disk and use it for datastore.

When I corrected these two, my server is up now.

I am new to VM and thanks for your patience allowing a newbee to learn :)

best regards
 
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