Good Morning,

 

I'm currently passing through my M1015 and HP expansion card to my unraid box.  However, I'd like to use those controllers with esx, and simply use RDM drives within Unraid.  Is it possible to move from passthrough to RDM without risking my data?

 

Thanks for any help!

 

~Spritz

Some things to think about when RDM'ing drives to unRAID in ESXi. 

• smartctl will/may not work - didn't for me anyway.
  
• probably no drive temps - I never got any when I tried RDM'ing a drive anyway.
  
• probably no spin down - unRAID VM never spun down a drive for me anyway.
  
• probaby no drive model and serial number - I just got a ESXi name.
  
• preclear script does work but no health reports since smartctl doesn't work - at least for me.
  

If you can live with those then it might work but I always started with an empty disk whenever I RDM'd a drive.  I did try going the other way and it worked (sort of) - RDM first then moved off VM to bare metal for Windows boot drive.  Windows wouldn't run properly since there were too many hardware differences between VM and bare metal.  The last time I tried RDM'ing to unRAID was with unRAID 4.7 so it might be different now but I doubt it changed enough to make me want to switch.

Yeah, I've run RDM drives before and ended up switching to passthrough a few years ago.  However, I was talking to the VMWare guys at my work about it and they had some suggestions on how to get RDM working properly.

 

My big concern is essentially being able to recreate my array without losing any data.

 

~Spritz

Here is something you could try:

• Setup a new VM of unRAID with free version.
  
• Temporarily shut down your current unRAID VM
  
• Connect one of your unRAID drives to MB port and RDM it to new free unRAID VM
  
• Mount the RDM'd drive outside of unRAID (I use unMENU for that) and see if you can read info from it.  Suggest you mount it READ ONLY so nothing changes and definitely don't format it if it shows as unformatted. The worst case should be that you would have to rebuild that one drive from parity when you return it to the shutdown unRAID VM.
  

If that works then it would probably work for all the other drives.  However the safest approach would be to backup all your data first then try RDM'ing your drives.  If they don't work but you still want to use it that way then just copy the backed up data to the essentially new array.

Hey Guy's!

 

I successfully have my unRAID as a VMware 5.5 guest with a IBM M1015 flashed for IT-mode in pass-through mode in ESXi. Everything looks great except for my idle drives are not spinning down...

 

Is there a fix for this?

Hey Guy's!

 

I successfully have my unRAID as a VMware 5.5 guest with a IBM M1015 flashed for IT-mode in pass-through mode in ESXi. Everything looks great except for my idle drives are not spinning down...

 

Is there a fix for this?

What version of unRAID are you running?

 

Can't say I've had this problem.  Have had unRAID VMs in ESXi 5.0 with various 5.0 betas and released versions as well as 6b14b all indicated that my drives were spun down.  But it is possible that the drive isn't actually spun down I'm just trusting that unRAID has it right.  I could try to find a post with info on how to tell with smartctl/hdparm to confirm but I'm confident that unRAID is displaying it correctly.

 

Hopefully someone can give you some idea's but I'm afraid I don't have any since I've never encountered the problem so far.

Here's an update; I verified that my drives are spinning down off my m1015 flashed for it-mode and passed-through on esxi 5.5. However, the unraid web UI does not show them as spun down. I confirmed this by witnessing a very quiet server and when I queried the shares, I heard the drives actually spinning up after a slight delay in response time.

 

I'm running unraid 5.06 and since I virtualized it in esx5.5 with a m1015 passed-through, unraid UI shows no spin down indication, or temp fluctuations.