Unraid 6.6.0 under ESXi - boot failure when > 1 core

If you can figure out what changed and what needs to be updated to fix this, I'm sure limetech would be happy to consider modifying unraid to get it to work, as long as the fix doesn't effect bare metal users negatively.

 

That said, you are pretty much on your own figuring out a solution. There is a small sub community here that runs unraid under ESXI, but there is no official support for doing so.

 

Limetech's position on running unraid under a hypervisor is pretty much as follows.

They don't actively discourage it, but it's up to you to get it running. Any issues with unraid must be reproduceable while running bare metal in order to get troubleshooting assistance from them.

 

I suggest you get together with the other people running unraid under ESXI and collaborate with them about this issue.

Thanks, Jonathan, that is kind of what I figured. 🙂

 

I did figure out a few things, and while this is definitely an ESXi issue, I'm going to add them here in case it might help anyone else (and in case I need to remember what I found).

 

First, I am using ESXi 6.0 and I don't know if any of the below applies to any other versions.

 

For 6.0, the "ESXi600-201808001.zip" patch fixes the issue I reported above where the Unraid booting process stops on Booting SMP Configuration.  This means that anyone experiencing this issue should be able to fix it by updating to the 201808001 patch or newer.

 

In my case, I had one other problem in that I am using 2x Supermicro  AOC-SAS2LP-MV8 SAS SATA cards (Marvell 88se9485) and need to pass them through ESXi to Unraid.  This works until the "ESXi600-201711001.zip" patch, which broke something.  So far I haven't been able to get the cards to work with the 201711001 patch or newer.

 

What I ended up doing was the run the following in an SSH connection to ESXi:

1. esxcli software vib install -d "/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/Patches/update-from-esxi6.0-6.0_update03.zip"
2. esxcli software vib install -d "/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/Patches/ESXi600-201710001.zip"
3. esxcli software vib update -d "/vmfs/volumes/datastore1/Patches/ESXi600-201808001.zip" --vibname cpu-microcode

Step 1 updates ESXi to the most recent EXSi update.  The path is where I saved the zip files, your location may differ.

Step 2 installs the latest patches that will work with my SAS SATA cards.

Step 3 installs just the vib that is needed to allow Unraid to boot in multi-processor mode.

 

Honestly, I don't know for sure that this set up won't cause any problems down the line but so far I have tested with Unraid, WIndows, OSX and Linux VM's in ESXi and everything seems to be working perfectly.