ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting
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@pmoncho said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
ESXi is loaded all into memory after boot up. Other than USB disk checks, nothing is stored on the USB key after the hypervisor is loaded. It mostly writes to the USB key on reboot/shutdown.
It is on embedded installs. (not on full version installs).
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@travisdh1 said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
Does your Dell have the SD card reader? If so, it runs the SD cards as a RAID1 array.
SD Card raid controller are "Kinda raid" there's no patrol read, there's no scrubbing, and it they have ugly habbit of not always flagging failure correctly (forcing you to rip out the bad card).
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@pmoncho said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
You really only need a 4GB USB key but I like to use 8GB or higher as they are still cheap for a higher quality USB key.
If your doing embedded installs PLEASE get at least 32GB. Your going to have issues with a crash dump partition either now or in the future with 4/8GB at some point.
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@pmoncho said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
I get it, although, to even sell an H330 on a Dell PowerEdge R840 is like selling standard breaks on a Audi A6 and making the driver request anti-lock breaks.
The H330 is at least 10x better than the dumpster fire that was the H300 (256 vs. like 25 QD). Still no cache, bastard megaraid on a HBA blah blah blah is all true.
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@StorageNinja said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
@scottalanmiller said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
The H330 is like for labs or testing. Shouldn't be found in a production environment. It's a fine card for what it is, just not a production use card
It's fine for a boot device but on Dell 14G most people use BOSS cards(Unless they are maxing out the PCI-E bays, and then getting a H330 embedded version)
Good point, a straight boot device setup it is great for.
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@StorageNinja said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
@DustinB3403 said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
ESXi recommends SD card, USB is a bit to fragile for the number of writes you'd be making to it.
M.2 SSD is the recomendation. SD cards lack any kind of ECC and the controllers are too dumb to prevent read discards. Throw in the fact that cheap SD cards are slow on boot, you can log local on a M.2, I'd say for non-lab usage M.2 is the recomendation going forward.
If you must go embedded SD card, I'd get at least 32GB as it will likely have fewer read endurance issues.
are servers starting to come with M.2 slots specifically for this? that would make sense - it also makes booting systems much easier I would think.
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@Dashrender said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
@StorageNinja said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
@DustinB3403 said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
ESXi recommends SD card, USB is a bit to fragile for the number of writes you'd be making to it.
M.2 SSD is the recomendation. SD cards lack any kind of ECC and the controllers are too dumb to prevent read discards. Throw in the fact that cheap SD cards are slow on boot, you can log local on a M.2, I'd say for non-lab usage M.2 is the recomendation going forward.
If you must go embedded SD card, I'd get at least 32GB as it will likely have fewer read endurance issues.
are servers starting to come with M.2 slots specifically for this? that would make sense - it also makes booting systems much easier I would think.
I have not seen any M.2 on dell servers yet. With that being said, they R840 the OP has, there are two rear 2.5" SATA (HDD/SDD) bays that may/may not be used for a boot device. Have not looked to find out if it is possible though.
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@pmoncho said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
@Dashrender said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
@StorageNinja said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
@DustinB3403 said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
ESXi recommends SD card, USB is a bit to fragile for the number of writes you'd be making to it.
M.2 SSD is the recomendation. SD cards lack any kind of ECC and the controllers are too dumb to prevent read discards. Throw in the fact that cheap SD cards are slow on boot, you can log local on a M.2, I'd say for non-lab usage M.2 is the recomendation going forward.
If you must go embedded SD card, I'd get at least 32GB as it will likely have fewer read endurance issues.
are servers starting to come with M.2 slots specifically for this? that would make sense - it also makes booting systems much easier I would think.
I have not seen any M.2 on dell servers yet. With that being said, they R840 the OP has, there are two rear 2.5" SATA (HDD/SDD) bays that may/may not be used for a boot device. Have not looked to find out if it is possible though.
yeah, I've seen servers in the past with internal HDD/SSD, it only makes sense to keep moving forward and put M.2 in there for this purpose - I would assume less space needed in chassis, less power consumption, less cooling possible, etc.
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@pmoncho said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
I have not seen any M.2 on dell servers yet
All 14G servers AFAIK support adding in a "BOSS" card that has 2 M.2 slots.
https://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/shared-content/data-sheets/en/Documents/Dell-PowerEdge-Boot-Optimized-Storage-Solution.pdf -
@StorageNinja said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
@pmoncho said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
I have not seen any M.2 on dell servers yet
All 14G servers AFAIK support adding in a "BOSS" card that has 2 M.2 slots.
https://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/shared-content/data-sheets/en/Documents/Dell-PowerEdge-Boot-Optimized-Storage-Solution.pdfby making it a card - it just seems like a way to charge more money, but yeah.. that's what I'm talking about.. Nice to see it's an option.
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@StorageNinja said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
@pmoncho said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
I have not seen any M.2 on dell servers yet
All 14G servers AFAIK support adding in a "BOSS" card that has 2 M.2 slots.
https://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/shared-content/data-sheets/en/Documents/Dell-PowerEdge-Boot-Optimized-Storage-Solution.pdfMy bad. Forgot about those. It is an additional card though and that is the stinky part.
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@Dashrender said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
by making it a card - it just seems like a way to charge more money, but yeah.. that's what I'm talking about.. Nice to see it's an option.
"By putting it on the motherboard, it just seems like a way to charge everyone who doesn't use for it
An H330 is going to cost you about the same, and wastes 2 drive slots.
FWIW VxRAIL uses BOSS for boot as of 14Gen so there is a decent volume of them in production (For 13Gen they used a high endurance SATADOM device). -
@Dashrender said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
@StorageNinja said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
@pmoncho said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
I have not seen any M.2 on dell servers yet
All 14G servers AFAIK support adding in a "BOSS" card that has 2 M.2 slots.
https://i.dell.com/sites/doccontent/shared-content/data-sheets/en/Documents/Dell-PowerEdge-Boot-Optimized-Storage-Solution.pdfby making it a card - it just seems like a way to charge more money, but yeah.. that's what I'm talking about.. Nice to see it's an option.
Some SBCs do that, too. Like the Pine64 upper end card.
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What kind of RAID did you set the drives on?
How much RAM?How did you setup the VM? How much storage, ram, vcpus?
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@Dashrender said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
What kind of RAID did you set the drives on?
How much RAM?How did you setup the VM? How much storage, ram, vcpus?
I’m at home now, but will try to answer to the best of my ability until I get back.
- RAID 5
- I tried ESXi 6.5, 6.7 & 6.7 U2, with Dell OEM 6.7 U2 on host.
- I originally was doing 20GB RAM, 2.5 TB HD, but later tried more basic 16GB RAM, 500GB HD
- CPU 2 Socket 2 core and 4 socket 1 core really just mixing it up at this point hoping anything will be different.
- I tried selecting SCSI Controller VMWare Paravirtual, but when I install VMWare Tools to load the driver so I can see the Partitions, it only lets me select the AMD64 which is wrong. Then it tells me I can’t install windows on the partition. So I was using the default LSI Logical SAS.
I made sure Virtualization was on in BIOS, and tried turning on Turbo, but not getting anywhere as of yet.
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@G-I-Jones said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
RAID 5
Why raid 5 today with all of the evidence that it's dead tech. Are these SSDs that makeup the array?
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@DustinB3403 said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
@G-I-Jones said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
RAID 5
Why raid 5 today with all of the evidence that it's dead tech. Are these SSDs that makeup the array?
My boss configured the RAID, and yes they are SSD’s.
Would you recommend 10?
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@DustinB3403 said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
@G-I-Jones said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
RAID 5
Why raid 5 today with all of the evidence that it's dead tech. Are these SSDs that makeup the array?
Additionally, I just got them to buy me some Thumb Drives (verbatim 32 GB). Thinking of running RAID 1 on those for ESXi (is it possible to do that with one partitioned USB or maybe that’s a bad idea because if the thing fails it all failed right?). At least until we can get an internal M.2 or SD setup going.
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@G-I-Jones said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
@DustinB3403 said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
@G-I-Jones said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
RAID 5
Why raid 5 today with all of the evidence that it's dead tech. Are these SSDs that makeup the array?
My boss configured the RAID, and yes they are SSD’s.
Would you recommend 10?
RAID 5 on SSD should be fine. It's the old-fashioned spinners that the major issues exist with.
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@travisdh1 said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
@G-I-Jones said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
@DustinB3403 said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
@G-I-Jones said in ESXi 6.7 Troubleshooting:
RAID 5
Why raid 5 today with all of the evidence that it's dead tech. Are these SSDs that makeup the array?
My boss configured the RAID, and yes they are SSD’s.
Would you recommend 10?
RAID 5 on SSD should be fine. It's the old-fashioned spinners that the major issues exist with.
Yeah with an SSD array you're fine, but with spinning rust I'd consider RAID 6 or RAID10
