Local Hard Disk Issue when installing ESXi 6.0

[blueangel5]

Hello , i would like to ask about the problem i encountered when installing the ESXi on my CISCO Blade UCS B200 M4. I have 2 local hard drive installed and in the Local Storage Profile options i selected Raid 1+0 . I did not touch the LUN Configuration there i just make it default.

And after that making the storage profile:

I Associate that profile to my server 2/1

When i boot up the Blade Server and tried to install the ESXi i got this error

[Kirk J]

Greetings.

Were you using the Cisco customized image ESXi installer ISO when you got this error?

Thanks,

Kirk

[blueangel5]

I used also the custom image for cisco Esxi. still receiving the same error. and also i noticed that there is 0 virtual drives handled by bios. only i see the 1 virtual drive present on virtual host adapter. should it cause this problem?

[HamR]

Hello,

I'm curious to know if you solved this issue. I have a similar problem where I have three LUNs defined, but only two are handled by the BIOS.

Cheers,

Ham

[Wes Austin]

Do you have a use case for the storage profile? You could create a RAID 1 in Local Disk Configuration on the service profile and install accordingly.

Do you have 4K sector drives?

[HamR]

Hi Wes,

My use case is SvSAN on a S3260.

I have two SSD drives mirrored and split into two LUNs - 100GB=boot and 350GB=cache. ESXi 6.5 sees both of these perfectly.

I also have a 60TB RAID6 LUN created from 13+1 HDDs that looks OK in the Service Profile and registers correctly as a virtual drive, but ESXi doesn't see it. Any thoughts?

Cheers,

Ham

[Wes Austin]

Hello,

I am not a S3260 expert, but reviewing the spec sheet, I see a lot of SSD/HDD mentions 4Kn and 512e drives.

https://www.cisco.com/c/dam/en/us/products/collateral/servers-unified-computing/ucs-s-series-storage-servers/s3260-specsheet.pdf

Looks like those are not designed for VMware: 

FAQ: Support statement for 512e and 4K Native drives for VMware vSphere and vSAN

Might want to check if you are using those drives?

[HamR]

The VMkernel log says "Unsupported sector size:4096".

[Wes Austin]

Looks like they are in fact 4K sector size.

https://www.cisco.com/c/en/us/td/docs/unified_computing/ucs/c/hw/C240M4/install/C240M4/replace.html

4K Sector Format Drives Considerations

• You must boot 4K sector format drives in UEFI mode, not legacy mode. See Setting Up Booting in UEFI Mode in the BIOS Setup Utilityor Setting Up Booting in UEFI Mode in the Cisco IMC GUI.
• Do not configure 4K sector format and 512-byte sector format drives as part of the same RAID volume.
• Operating system support on 4K sector drives is as follows: Windows: Win2012 and Win2012R2; Linux: RHEL 6.5, 6.6, 6.7, 7.0, 7.2; SLES 11 SP3, and SLES 12. ESXi/Vmware is not supported.

[HamR]

Thanks Wes.

The drives are UCSC-C3X60-HD6TB, which do indeed have 4K sectors.

Cheers,
Ham

[Ahmed Elnagar]

Just an update for the post, VMware starting 6.7 now support 4Kn drives

[jim_atkinson]

Can you provide info on what type of RAID Controller inventory you have on the blade in question? Physical or Soft?