February 15, 20206 yr Just wanted to share my recent experience migrating from physical server to ESXi for unraid. It took me quite significant time gathering and reading tips/documents on the internet before making the move. My hesitation was whether unraid really need "hw-passthrough" or "disk RDM" is sufficient. From what I have experienced .. as long your CPU support virtualization then it is enough to jump on the virtualization wagon. I hope this will help others that wanted to move to ESXi and does not want to upgrade their Motherboard to passthrough/iommu capable. Physical setup: Unraid v6.8.1 Motherboard M5A78L-M-PLUS-USB3 CPU AMD FX8320E LSI 9207-8i [in hba/IT mode] 1x SSD for cache disk 7x HDD Powersupply 380W unraid license on 4GB usb stick New ESXi setup: ESXi v6.7-U3 - reuse all the hw from above Motherboard M5A78L-M-PLUS-USB3 have to add Realtek ethernet driver [https://vibsdepot.v-front.de/wiki/index.php/List_of_currently_available_ESXi_packages] I cannot passthru LSI 9207-8i as the motherboard does not support iommu Verify that in unraid vm settings, SCSI Controller 0 = "VMware Paravirtual" - this is important so the HDD Serial Number can be passthru to unraid (otherwise you will need to rebuilt your parity disk) 7x HDD connect to LSI 9207-81 and configure them as RDM directly from ESXi a. esxi > VM > Edit Settings > Add harddisk > New Raw disk > b. on the "Hard disk" setting .. configure: Controller location = "SCSI Controller 0" and Disk Compatibility = Physical and Disk Mode = "Independent - persistent" for the Cache drive - SSD, I connect it to the motherboard SATA port. There is a known issue with LSI 9207-8i not supporting TRIM (unless LSI downgraded to fw P16). use this link to passthrough the indvidual SSD drive to unraid as RDM - [https://gist.github.com/Hengjie/1520114890bebe8f805d337af4b3a064]. I cannot use the method i use for the HDD. use plopkexec iso to boot unraid via the usb stick (so I can keep the license) - download here https://www.plop.at/en/plopkexec/download.html - choose "all precompiled versions, 32/64 bit, EFI, ISO." extract the tar and copy the iso to your ESXi datastore. back to the VM edit settings > CD/DVD Drive 1 > Datastore ISO file > CD/DVD Media = plopkexec64.iso also set your VM to boot to BIOS and change the boot device to CD/DVD passthrough your unraid usb stick by adding a new USB device download unraid specific vmwaretool from appspace "openVMTools_compiled" after you have successfully boot your unraid Result: after reboot, plopkexec will auto search for usb device and boot from it if you use SCSI Paravirtual, the disks will reallign as the serial numbers got passthru as-is as before remember to install "openVMTools_compiled" upgraded unraid to v6.8.2 and it finished successfully on unraid Main page, SMART and spin up/down are reflected correctly. I am glad I made the change to ESXi .. a better use of the FX8320 cpu ==== Some screenshot of the configuration ==== HDD RDM and SCSI controller setting: SSD rdm: Plopkexec and USB stick passthru: Unraid dashboard: Disk spun down: Disk spun up: Temp work for the HDD on LSI: Though Temp is not working for cache SSD that passthrough via MB sata port: Edited February 15, 20206 yr by ez2002 add screenshots
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