IBM M1015 reliability in ESXi 5.1?

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HalfJawElite

Weaksauce
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Jul 2, 2012
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Just wondering how many of you out there have used or are using the IBM M1015 SAS/SATA RAID cards in ESXi without any problems. I currently have an Intel RS2WC040 RAID card that won't even allow ESXi to boot when it's installed in the system and am looking for a better alternative. I plan on using it to pass through a set of hard drives to a windows server and using it for file storage and media streaming.

Any thoughts on how reliable it would be for me?
 
I'm using an M1015 passed through to an OI VM under ESXi 5.1 with no issues.
 
McTurkey said:
I'm using an M1015 passed through to an OI VM under ESXi 5.1 with no issues.
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Sweet. From having the Intel card sitting on my desk for the past 2 months after several failed attempts to get it working under 5.0U1 I gave up. Good to hear that at least something works out of the box in 5.1. How long have you had the card passed through in the host?
 
danswartz said:
I've been doing the same thing for going on a year now.
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What guests are you passing the card(s) over to? Do the drivers for the M1015's work in Server 2008 R2? I tried installing the driver for my Intel card in a straight up Server 08 R2 install and it detected the card but stated that it failed to start for some reason.
 
danswartz said:
I'm using it for a virtualized openindiana NAS/SAN appliance.
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Cool maybe something I'll look into as well in the near future. Sounds like these cards are more reliable than my Intel one is. Makes me wonder if they really have their shit together regarding the RS2WCxxx family of cards.
 
HalfJawElite said:
Sweet. From having the Intel card sitting on my desk for the past 2 months after several failed attempts to get it working under 5.0U1 I gave up. Good to hear that at least something works out of the box in 5.1. How long have you had the card passed through in the host?
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I've had it passed through for several months now altogether. I updated this box to 5.1 pretty much as soon as it dropped. Only issue I had was with the (unsupported) Ceton InfiniTV 4 not working with pass-through.
 
McTurkey said:
I've had it passed through for several months now altogether. I updated this box to 5.1 pretty much as soon as it dropped. Only issue I had was with the (unsupported) Ceton InfiniTV 4 not working with pass-through.
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I've been starting to read about certain cards not working in consumer base motherboards. Since my home ESXi server runs on an ASUS P9X79 WS board Iwas wondering if you could tell me what your setup is on your server?
 
HalfJawElite said:
I've been starting to read about certain cards not working in consumer base motherboards. Since my home ESXi server runs on an ASUS P9X79 WS board Iwas wondering if you could tell me what your setup is on your server?
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Using a Supermicro X9DRI-LN4F+-O in my main server.
 
HalfJawElite said:
What's your server setup? I'm running an ASUS P9X79 WS board and was wondering if the IBM is able to run on consumer workstation boards.
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I've had LSI cards in the P6T6 WS board, no issues, don't see why it would be any different then in X79 version.
 
ND40oz said:
I've had LSI cards in the P6T6 WS board, no issues, don't see why it would be any different then in X79 version.
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So far windows detects the card but says that it cannot start. From the useless support Intel gave me is that it might either be a bad card or it is not supported on the system. I'd hate to buy an IBM and have it fail on me too because of incompatibility.
 
HalfJawElite said:
So far windows detects the card but says that it cannot start. From the useless support Intel gave me is that it might either be a bad card or it is not supported on the system. I'd hate to buy an IBM and have it fail on me too because of incompatibility.
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Does it hang in the bios? An M5014 I had did that and wouldn't start in windows, just showed up with an error. Ended up having to flash it to a 9260 to finally get it working correctly.
 
ND40oz said:
Does it hang in the bios? An M5014 I had did that and wouldn't start in windows, just showed up with an error. Ended up having to flash it to a 9260 to finally get it working correctly.
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Nope. Windows boots, runs normally even accepted the driver for the card. It just tells me Device Could Not Start (code 10). Intel doesn't seem to see any problem with thec ard except that its unsupported.
 
HalfJawElite said:
Nope. Windows boots, runs normally even accepted the driver for the card. It just tells me Device Could Not Start (code 10). Intel doesn't seem to see any problem with thec ard except that its unsupported.
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So in the bios, can you get into the card config and configure an array.
 
If you have no other use for the Intel card, I'd try crossflashing it and see if you can't get it working that way.
 
What is the method to doing that? My board doesn't have an efi shell to flash the Intel firmware with.
 
Use a dos boot with the megarec.exe. I think that card is based on the 2008 chipset, just like the M1015.

http://forums.servethehome.com/show...ller-and-HBA-Complete-Listing-Plus-OEM-Models

•Intel® RAID Controller RS2WC040 1x4 ports SAS internal vertical, no cache, no BBU, RAID 0, 1, 10, and 5, Passthrough (non RAID), should cross flash to a LSI9211 IT/IR and LSI9240 (which it basically is)
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The instructions for crossflashing are here: http://www.servethehome.com/ibm-serveraid-m1015-part-4/
 
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