UnRAID on VMWare ESXi with Raw Device Mapping


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You would be missing the point using vmdk

 

 

As in

1 drives wont go to sleep when not in use.

2 vmdk / data store has to be saved on a disk.  Whats protecting the data store outside unraid.

 

Eg 5 vmdks on 2 physical disks (3 on disk 1 

2 on disk2) passed to unraid.  Which sees 5 disks.  If one of the physical disks goes you will loose data.

 

 

 

Sent from my GT-N7000 using Tapatalk 2

 

 

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Someone said alternative to Raw Device Mapping is to present normal VMDK with a thick eager - no performance benefit of a hack RDM versus a thick eager VMD

 

Is that true?

 

MY recent tests on 'consumer grade hardware' revealed that RDM was faster then a .vmdk with thich eager.

Plus the fact of all the setup time.

 

1. I had to format as a VMFS data store.

2. I had to create the .vmdk on that data store and it took hours to make a 2TB .vmdk on a 6TB RAID0 eSATA unit.

 

Performance at times was disappointing when doing some dd write and read tests.

 

My assessment is that .vmdk for the data drives is not very useful,

I like the ability of being able to take out the unRAID drive and mounting it on another machine to read directly without having to load a VMware driver or OS.

 

For a cache it will work fine since that is only temporary, but for my long term data, I would use raw passthrough or RDM

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  • 2 weeks later...

Hello,

sorry if this questions has been answered before, I just want to know if I should invest more time researching into this topic before i do.

 

I am thinking of going the ESXi road for my first unRAID machine.

I bought a Motherboard with 8 Sata Ports because i didn´t want to buy a RAID-card just yet. It´s this one: Asrock B75 M-Pro3

 

I haven´t actually tried if ESXi is possible on my purchased hardware, before I do that, I would like to know if I need to buy a card (like the  IBM M1015).

 

My goal is to have 5 disks running in unRAID on ESXi by just beeing connected to the MB Sataports.

Can i achieve that with RDM?

Can i get Temperature and Smartreadings via RDM?

Can i put my HDDs to sleep?

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Can i achieve that with RDM?

I´m using the same motherboard and it´s working fine with a pass-through saslp-mv8 (after buying a new i5 processor with vt-d)

 

You can run the 5 disks via RDM but it´s a bit of a hassle.

 

Can i get Temperature and Smartreadings via RDM?

Not via RDM

 

Can i put my HDDs to sleep?

not via RDM

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Can i achieve that with RDM?

I´m using the same motherboard and it´s working fine with a pass-through saslp-mv8 (after buying a new i5 processor with vt-d)

 

You can run the 5 disks via RDM but it´s a bit of a hassle.

 

Can i get Temperature and Smartreadings via RDM?

Not via RDM

 

Can i put my HDDs to sleep?

not via RDM

 

my comments...

Can i get Temperature and Smartreadings via RDM?

You cannot get temperature readings via the calls that emhttp is using. Nor via hddtemp.

When using the -z option to build the pass through rdm, I was able to get SMART information from the drive.  emhttp kept thinking the drive was in a spin down state and continually blinked.

 

Can i put my HDDs to sleep?

With my tests doing hdparm -y, It seems as though the drives do go to sleep. I can hear them spin down and spin up. I'm using the -z option when building the .rdm link.  emhttp always shows the drive blinking.

 

It would be my recommendation to purchase a controller and pass it through unless these issues do not bother you.

 

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Thank you both!

 

I think I will stay without ESXi for a while and run a VM from within unRAID.

When all my MB Sataports are full with HDDs over time, I will buy Controller cards and go down the ESXi road.

 

Sounds very tempting to try ESXi, but with the errors you described I don´t think I will be happy.

And I don´t want to buy a Controller card right now, because I bought the MB specifically for the 8 Sataports, so i wouldn´t have to buy a Card for at least some time.

 

There shouldn´t be any problems when I change from a regular unRAID with a VM to ESXi in some time, should there?

I mean HDD-wise.

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Thank you both!

 

I think I will stay without ESXi for a while and run a VM from within unRAID.

When all my MB Sataports are full with HDDs over time, I will buy Controller cards and go down the ESXi road.

 

Sounds very tempting to try ESXi, but with the errors you described I don´t think I will be happy.

And I don´t want to buy a Controller card right now, because I bought the MB specifically for the 8 Sataports, so i wouldn´t have to buy a Card for at least some time.

 

There shouldn´t be any problems when I change from a regular unRAID with a VM to ESXi in some time, should there?

I mean HDD-wise.

 

 

HDD wise, I don't think there will be a problem, however you will need to be careful on how you do the RDM later, unless you do pass through.

 

Later on, you will need to purchase 2 controllers to go past 8 drives that are passed through directly to unRAID.  that is all depending if your motherboard can support pass through.

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  • 4 weeks later...

Thank you both!

 

I think I will stay without ESXi for a while and run a VM from within unRAID.

When all my MB Sataports are full with HDDs over time, I will buy Controller cards and go down the ESXi road.

 

Sounds very tempting to try ESXi, but with the errors you described I don´t think I will be happy.

And I don´t want to buy a Controller card right now, because I bought the MB specifically for the 8 Sataports, so i wouldn´t have to buy a Card for at least some time.

 

There shouldn´t be any problems when I change from a regular unRAID with a VM to ESXi in some time, should there?

I mean HDD-wise.

 

Hi weebotech

Quick question

For n54l , can I

- flash mod bios

- install Esxi

- install unraid

- create a rdm for the build in 4 bays drives

  ( will I see 4 different drives or 1 big drive .... In the RDM and unraid ? )

}

 

 

 

HDD wise, I don't think there will be a problem, however you will need to be careful on how you do the RDM later, unless you do pass through.

 

Later on, you will need to purchase 2 controllers to go past 8 drives that are passed through directly to unRAID.  that is all depending if your motherboard can support pass through.

 

 

Thx

 

Too bad

My HP N54L cannot do pass thru

 

 

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  • 3 weeks later...

Sorry guys if this post seams out of place as I  am still searching and reading other threads  but I do want to ask a question here firs.

 

 

I just bought this setup from TAMs (see specs below)

ALL for $408.00 including shipping

they had a sale for quad-core system  at the time, $319  instead of $349

so it on it's way here :-)

 

I am running unraid 5.0 beta13 free license  on slap-together AMD system that I want to replace.

I want to have ESXi 5.x setup with unraid running in VM with all HDD passed through

 

can you good people point me in te right direction on how to do this properly.

an again I am still reading this thread and search other threads.

but if you know any good howto post or documents that could help please let me know.

 

thanks .

 

 

 

/* Hardware specs :

 

Case is 24 Bay Supermicro SC846 with caddies

Motherboard: H8DME-2

Procs: Qty 1 AMD Opteron Quad Core 2346HE @ 1.8GHz

Ram: 8GB 4x 2GB, 12 empty slots

IPMI Card: Kira 100

Qty 3 SAT2-MV8 Raid cards

Qty 2 Ablecom PWS-902-IR Power supplies

*/

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  • 2 months later...

Hey,

 

I solved this by thinking a bit differently, works flawlessly to get harddrives to spin down. Atleast for me.

 

Since RDM mapped drives is actually running on a virtualized scsi controller inside the machine S.M.A.R.T. works but sleep does not as for all you others. I installed a software called sdparm for scsi controllers/drives (not hdparm which you all try to use above) and wrote a custom made script to put harddrives to sleep when inactive.

 

They will properly wake up when accessed as they are expected to. unRAID readings if the drives are sleeping or not will still show wrong values, but if youre listening to the drives you will hear them spin down, and the temperature readings will change.

 

In order to use sdparm do the following:

Find out the scsi link to your drive with "lsscsi" and look for the numbers in the first columt. Example [2:0:4:0] for in my case /dev/sdd

[2:0:3:0]      disk      ATA        WDC WD1002FAEX-0  05.0    /dev/sdd

[2:0:4:0]      disk      ATA        WDC WD1002FAEX-0  05.0    /dev/sde

[2:0:5:0]      disk      ATA        WDC WD1002FAEX-0  05.0    /dev/sdf

 

Send the following commands to the controller:

/path/to/sdparm --quiet --command=sync /dev/bsg/2:0:4:0

/path/to/sdparm --quiet --command=stop /dev/bsg/2:0:4:0

 

This will properly spin down the RDM mapped drive even if it is on the motherboard, atleast in my case.

 

Use the statistics from /proc/diskstats in order to fetch current statistics, and save them.

Save this to a temp file, for use for the next run of the script.

"cat /proc/diskstats |grep sdd > /dev/shm/sdd.stats"

 

The temp file will contain the following

"cat /dev/shm/sdd.stats"

    8      48 sdd 123 456 789 0123 45678 90123456

 

If the numbers has not changed on the second run, send the commands to the drives and they will go to sleep.

 

Do not forget to turn of unRAID's internal hdd sleep for this to work, since running hdparm at the same time will mess things up. hdparm does not find the drives as proper ATA drives even if they are presented as such.

 

Give it a go and good luck.

 

----

 

Currently running ESXi 5.1 Update 1 on a non supported motherboard without VT-d for passthrough so all drives are RDM mapped and this works, so it should definitly work for you, but takes a bit of tinkering. This also works under most linux distributions I have tried on that also have RDM mapped drives in the same server, each virtual host can control its own drive without further tinkering with hdparm, use sdparm.

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  • 1 year later...

This is excellent progress here and thank you all for the development and testing.

 

My current native unraid build on a supermicro x7sbe MB with an 6 port onboard and a jbod pci 4 port sata2 controller may have to wait for migration to my esxi 5.5, which is ready to go as a bootable off a USB stick, until my VMware supported IBM m1015 8 port sas/sata pci card arrives (only $100 off eBay) so I can do true storage controller pass-through for optimal performance and unraid-to-drive support (i.e. Smart)

 

Although I'm very tempted and impatient to try rdm with my onboard and/or 4 port sata2 card...

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