HP p400 + ESXi 5.1 in non-HP server

[DieTa]

Hi,

I thought I should share a way to use the HP p400 RAID controller on a non-HP server/board with ESXi.

As it seems, there's no driver for the p400 on ESXi 5.1, also, there are no drivers to install for 5.1 afterwards. I've seen the storage, but on every try to format it, I received a error message (which I've forgotten to note - whoops).

I had installed ESXi 5.1 on a USB stick, so I thought: what if I install ESXi 5.1 onto the RAID itself? It turns out, that this is the solution. I removed the USB stick and installed it on the RAID5 I made of 3x 640GB HDs. ESXi has created a datastore of the rest of the free space on it's own.

Sure, I can't track the state of the controller inside the vSphere client - unfortunately, but at least it works

Ciao
Dennis

 

[Wrench00]

You might be able too. Did you try installing the HP Vmware Image? You could also pull the driver out of it and build your own custom image.