Moving PERC 6/i from physical PC to ESX host. Questions inside

E

Eulogy

2[H]4U
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Nov 9, 2005
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Let me start by thanking you for reading this. A couple of months ago I posed a similar question on here and didn't get much in the way of answers. Hopefully someone out there can give me some pointers, tips and answers here :).
I have a NAS that I built. It's getting long in the tooth, and I'd like to change the hardware for it. The NAS is running Server 2008 R2, is my primary DC and hosts a few other apps as well. I'm not really concerned with the DC aspect of it or anything, as if I really wanted to I can P2V and call it a day. I'm mostly concerned with how to handle the PERC6 going forward.
I also have an ESX host that I badly need to upgrade. I can't run the VMs on it I want to due to hardware (RAM) limitations. So, since I need to rebuild two boxes, I thought about combining them, and killing two birds with one stone.
Here are my questions:
1) Moving the PERC 6/i from the physical box to the ESX box. Obviously, the hardware will just swap over with no issues. I'll want to have the RAID array on the card show up in a guest OS, using PCI pass through I assume (I've never used that function myself, yet)?
1b) In moving the PERC card to a new computer, and then passing the array through to the OS, will I suffer any kind of data integrity issue? I'll obviously backup my important data, but I don't have a method of backing up my entire NAS at this time. Keeping it intact would be very beneficial.
3) Overall steps to complete this (best practice)? Here is what I have in my head:
- Build out new ESX host
- Shut down current NAS
- move PERC card/drives from NAS to ESX host
- setup ESX to pass through the PERC to a guest OS
- make sure guest OS sees array

I think that's all I have. Hopefully someone's gone through a similar process (surely someone has?) and can help :). Again, thanks for your time & input.
 
you should not run into any issues moving the array and presenting controller to the VM, I have an older Asus board that does not do hardware pass-through and was able to present the disk as an RDM on my ESXi 5 box, I've done this since 3.5 without issue. depending on driver support for the PERC in windows you might need to install the dell drivers.
 
i did this similar thing but it was with an LSI 1068E Controller with there being no raid setup on the card (Flashed with IT Firmware) when i got the Nexenta OS back on the box the only real issue i had was that it detected the drives in different positions (this also could have been my fault) but after i got the drive change all handled it came up no issues.

i still use it this way to day (Nexenta ZFS w/Raid - Z2)
 
Ok, cool. Good to hear that it "should" work. I still am worried a bit and want to find a method that I can backup the entire thing first though. Until I do that, I'm putting this one on hold...
 
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