Using both Hardware raid and software raid in ucs c240 m4 server

[prajinbias1]

Hi all,

I am Prajin, working as Network support engineer in IT industry.

Today i found a problem in ucs 240 m4sx server.e

I created Raid1 for internal SSD drives (2 nos with 120 GB) with LSI software raid, while installing esxi 6.0 I found that two drives with 120 GB.

I am also using Dedicated hardware Raid for SAS drives.

Can we use both hardware and software raid in same server for creating virtual drives ?

Anbody can help me ?

Regards

Prajin P R

[Kirk J]

Greetings.

Esxi does not support the software raid, MegaraidSR.

We do see customers use the MegaraidSR raid1 volume/PCH controller in Linux OS installs, and use the SAS Raid controller for data volumes.  Most Linux and Windows versions support the MegaRaid SR software raid, but VMware does not.

Kirk...

[Alex Hubner]

Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 7.3 just dropped support for the UCS software RAID (aka "fake RAID") that is present on any UCS C-series (M3, M4 as well as M5).

https://access.redhat.com/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/7/html/7.3_Release_Notes/known_issues_hardware_enablement.html

As of this writing no solution is available. Even if you are lucky to have a dedicated hardware RAID controller (MRAID12G or other) this means you'll have to sacrifice two front disk slots (a problem if you have it at full capacity - e.g. for Server-SAN or HCI workloads) or rely on the FlexFlash SD card controller (which is limited in 64 GB size and its VERY slow)...

I'm now stuck with a bunch of expensive C240 M4 servers that cannot be upgrade to RHEL 7.3 and beyond... Not good, not good. :-(