ez2002 Posted February 15, 2020 Share Posted February 15, 2020 (edited) 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, 2020 by ez2002 add screenshots 1 3 Quote Link to comment
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