Unraid on ESXi 7.0 - Confimed Working

[BruceRobertson]

For anyone considering the plunge I did an online upgrade from ESXi 6.7 to ESXi 7.0 last night and although it's early days my Unraid VM is working fine. I just followed this old guide http://www.virtubytes.com/2017/07/10/online-upgrade-esxi-6-5-using-esxcli/ and substituted ESXi-7.0 in the grep line when  looking for the right image profile.

The first time I ran the upgrade I got a warning about incompatible hardware, which was a Dell Perc H310 controller. Since I'm passing that through to the Unraid VM is can be safely ignored. Re-running the update with the '--no-hardware-warning' switch ignores the warning and allows the upgrade to proceed.

 

My only issue after the upgrade was that I couldn't attach the Unraid USB stick to the VM. I eventually remembered that I'd previously been using the older vmklinux USB drivers which have now been removed from ESXi 7. Once I'd re-enabled the native USB drivers with

esxcli system module set -m=vmkusb -e=TRUE

and rebooted I could see all my USB devices and was able to attach the Unraid USB stick to the VM and boot it.

 

I was lucky that all my hardware was supported, but do some checking first before upgrading

• there's advice out there for checking for anything using vmklinux drivers https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2019/04/what-is-the-impact-of-the-vmklinux-driver-stack-deprecation.html
• You can run the upgrade in dryrun mode to get a list of any incompatible hardware
• Assume that recovery console won't work if you want to downgrade again. There's a lot of articles out there that suggest that you can just launch the recovery console to downgrade to the previously installed version, but for whatever reason that option wasn't available to me.

 

HW List: Gigabyte X570 Aorus Elite motherboard with a Dell PERC H310 in IT mode passed through to Unraid.

Edited April 11, 2020 by BruceRobertson

[JohnO]

Great stuff!  Thanks for taking the leap for us all.

[StevenD]

Thanks! I was actually playing around with this today. I bought a new Ryzen motherboard and processor for my gaming rig and I figured I would play around with vSphere 7.0 and unRAID before installing it.  I have been unable to passthrough the USB controllers to my unRAID vm.  I will try out your esxcli command.

Edited April 11, 2020 by StevenD

[StevenD]

One million "Thank you"s @BruceRobertson.  That worked perfectly! 

 

My openVMTools_compiled plugin works just fine as well under vSphere 7.0 and unRAID 6.9.0-beta1.

 

 

Edited April 11, 2020 by StevenD

[StevenD]

And the best part....you can boot directly off of the USB now!  You no longer need to use a VMDK (my preferred method) or PLOP.

 

 

[JohnO]

Neat!

[BruceRobertson]

1 hour ago, StevenD said:

I have been unable to passthrough the USB controllers to my unRAID vm.  I will try out your esxcli command.

In case it's the same issue I had no luck passing through the Dell Perc H310 or a USB controller on my Ryzen build until I found a post on Reddit describing a similar problem and followed their suggestion of setting VMKernel.Boot.disableACSCheck to True in Advanced Settings on the ESXi host. The Reddit post is here,

 

That's really good news about being able to boot directly from the USB stick now. I had not spotted that! It means I can retire the plopkexec iso I was using. Thanks for the tip.

[joyson]

Hi can any1 tell me how to configure plop or plopkexec on esxi 6.7 i was able to passthrough the usb but plop was not booting unraid. can any1 help me thanks in advance 

[uldise]

7 hours ago, joyson said:

plop was not booting unraid

just download plopkExec.iso, attach it to VM as CD-ROM. Start your VM, it should boot from plopKExec. if there is unraid USB connected, then plopKExec will automatically choose it and continue to boot. so, are you attached your unraid USB to VM?

[joyson]

Hi 

Thanks for the reply please check the attached screenshot for my configuration 

[doron]

@joyson, is your USB drive bootable? Have you gone through the "make_bootable" step of the Unraid installation?

[joyson]

@doron i used the Unraid USB Flash creator do it need anything else to make the USB bootable?

[doron]

Yes that's the way to do it (I was thinking of the old, more manual way of creating the boot drive) but your screenshot show a WD Passport drive - you did install it on the USB thumb drive, right? (the Ultra Fit). Just making sure.

[joyson]

@doron yes i make it for ultra fit its still not booting

[uldise]

@joyson that's really strange.. one more thing to try - use plopKExec.iso instead of ploKExec64.iso..

if that don't help, try to use new ESXi7 builtin USB startup..

[5STAR]

I have ESXI 7.0 working fine as well.. also passthru of graphics card, raid controller in IT mode, nvme drive all no issues

[joyson]

thanks guys got it working on ESXi 6.7 didnt try on ESXi 7.0 will try soon the problem was that in VM setting i had selected USB 2.0 and i my ESXi Host had USB 3.0 that was the problem so i had to change it to USB 3.0 in VM setting.

but My Speed drops in middle of the transfer i got 10GB switch if i copy 1gb file it get speed of 420-490 MB/sec but when i copy large file my speed drops to 90MB/sec in the midle of the transfer any1 had this issue ?

[mustava]

Hi All,

I successfully upgraded from esx 6.7 u2to esx 7.0 Last night. I had a bit more of a bumpy experience,

Thus far:

• Had an issue updating the existing usb bases esx install... installed as per normal upgrade process, successfully booted from USB into esx 7.0 and started up all my VM's including unraid 100% perfect. Needed to reboot the server to toggle pass-through on a device... ESX never came back up (vmware recovery error) and forced me to start from scratch
• Re-installed ESX 7.0 and re-registered VM's.
• Boot unraid perfectly, everything comes back up perfectly including my RDM's for onboard attached sata drives. (I have a mix of RDM's and pass through drives which have been rock solid in 6.7)

From this point, I have started noticing super slow performance. First in plex, and now upon further inspection even just browsing my shares.
It takes a full minute to even open a share or sub folder. This is true even with nothing else is running on the server.

 

Any one have any ideas? I cant see any suspect errors in the logs.

 

Good luck to anyone taking the plunge!

[mustava]

12 minutes ago, mustava said:

Hi All,

I successfully upgraded from esx 6.7 u2to esx 7.0 Last night. I had a bit more of a bumpy experience,

Thus far:

• Had an issue updating the existing usb bases esx install... installed as per normal upgrade process, successfully booted from USB into esx 7.0 and started up all my VM's including unraid 100% perfect. Needed to reboot the server to toggle pass-through on a device... ESX never came back up (vmware recovery error) and forced me to start from scratch
• Re-installed ESX 7.0 and re-registered VM's.
• Boot unraid perfectly, everything comes back up perfectly including my RDM's for onboard attached sata drives. (I have a mix of RDM's and pass through drives which have been rock solid in 6.7)

From this point, I have started noticing super slow performance. First in plex, and now upon further inspection even just browsing my shares.
It takes a full minute to even open a share or sub folder. This is true even with nothing else is running on the server.

 

Any one have any ideas? I cant see any suspect errors in the logs.

 

Good luck to anyone taking the plunge!

Wow ok - I just found the issue by chance two minutes after writing this, despite trying to fix it for hours....

Due to the new ESX installation, the vSwitch for my LAN network had the 'MAC address changes' security setting set to 'Reject'.

Reject. If the guest OS changes the effective MAC address of the virtual machine to a value that is different from the MAC address of the VM network adapter (set in the .vmx configuration file), the switch drops all inbound frames to the adapter.

If the guest OS changes the effective MAC address of the virtual machine back to the MAC address of the VM network adapter, the virtual machine receives frames again.

I guess due to the OS having existing values, and the new install/new NIC's were assigned different values and frames were being blocked by the switch.
The more interesting thing is why it worked, slowly, rather than at all...

 

[axeman]

I was able to do this about a week ago... 

 

My CPU was unsupported to so I had to add the allowLegacyCPU option to the boot config file AND each VM's advanced configuration parameter needs an monitor.allowLegacyCPU = True 

 

That leads to SUPER slow boot times on older VMS and even VMs upgraded to 7.0. however, newly created VMs are fine. 

 

I'm trying to do USB boot and that works, but for some reason, USB passthrough with my SAS card does NOT work. Unraid seems to find the devices ... but right before the login prompt crashes. I can't seem to get any info before the crash happens. 

 

Anyone else having trouble with passthrough on Esxi 7.0 and UnRaid? The reddit thread linked above seems to be able to even see the card as passthrough capable, which I don't think applies to my situation. 

[axeman]

I disabled IOMMU in the CPU settings and that seems to allow the machine to boot natively off the USB, with a LSI card passthru no issues. Going to be testing some more in terms of performance, but boot is MUCH snappier than the old (BIOS based) VM booting. 

[zer0zer0]

So...I have Unraid running under ESXi 7.0 as well, but can't do PCI passthrough and also have Hardware Virtualization enabled so I can use VM Manager.

If I try and enable it I get an error - "Failed - PCI passthrough devices cannot be added when Nested Hardware-Assisted Virtualization is enabled."

 

Is there a hack to get this to work?

Or has it always been the case that you can only choose one of the other?


 

Edited April 30, 2020 by zer0zer0

[Pantigon]

 

It has been disabled since version 6.7 by VMware Engineering team. Can't turn on both at the same time.

[kevin yu]

For those of you who want a complete guide on how to set up an unRAID VM on ESXi 7.0U2+, I wrote a walkthrough for that. Feel free to vist https://www.hikariai.net/blog/23-virtualize-unraid-server-in-vmware-esxi-7.0/