Tag Archives: Hardware

SATA Expansion Card Selection

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In my previous article, The Storage Challenge, I explained my thinking when it comes to storage for the virtual environment. The conclusion was that I need some kind of SATA controller to set up the storage how I want.

 The requirements I have on the controller are as follows

  • Sata III / 6G support
  • Support for 3+TB drives
  • 8 SATA ports
  • RAID 1
  • Drive hotswap

 Let’s break them down.

  • SATA III/6G is not really a needed today as I will start off with only mechanical SATA II/3G drives. However, I might add an SSD drive to the mix later on which would make use of the added bandwidth.
  • 3+TB drives. Once again, I will begin with only 1TB drives but since the main focus of this storage solution is storage and backup I will most likely increase the amount of storage at a later stage.
  • 8 SATA ports. The initial plan is to connect 4 drives to the controller so 8 is pretty much the next step.
  • RAID 1 is not really needed as I plan on beginning with software RAID1. This option is more of an educational decision. RAID 0 or RAID 1 does not require that much from the controllers and they doesn’t get that expensive. Stepping up to RAID 5 or 6 and we’re talking about a completely different price point.
  • Drive hot swap. The goal of this all-in-one machine is that it will always be online. Hence, I would like to be able to add a hot swap HDD bay down the road. I’m also interested in trying how the OS will handle hot swap when the drives are in a software RAID array. Another educational aspect.

With the requirement list set I started searching for a suitable card. Since I run ESXi on the hardware I would like to have native support for it in case I decide to use RAID below ESXi. Looking at the VMware white list for storage adapters (link), the safest bet is to use a card based on an LSI controller. As I have come to understand, many large hardware companies rebrand LSI card to their own brand. These cards happens to be cheaper than LSI’s own cards. ServeTheHome have some excellent articles and summaries on what cards from different manufacturers are based on. Here in Sweden it seems like IBM and their ServeRAID cards are the cheapest with comparable controllers.

 Using the excellent sorting mechanism of Prisjakt.nu boiled it all down to these four cards:

  • IBM ServeRAID BR10i
  • IBM ServeRAID M1015
  • IBM ServeRAID M1115
  • IBM ServeRAID M5110

Here is a great summary on the IBM website regarding the ServeRAID adapters. BR10i is not capable of SATA 6G or 3TB drives so it’s out of the list. M5110 is a nice card capable of RAID5 but is also somewhat 50% more expensive than the M1X15 cards. M1015 seems to be a really popular card to flash to LSI’s own firmwares to enable different operating modes. M1115 seems to be pretty much the same card but I have not yet found any information on flashing it with LSI firmwares. M1015 is slightly cheaper so I decided to go for it.

ServeTheHome also happens to have a pointer to a pretty good deal for people in the United States on a IBM ServeRAID M1015

Issue #1: Intel DQ77MK and booting from USB

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The first challenge I’ve come across is getting the DQ77MK motherboard to boot to a USB device. I want to have ESXi installed on a USB drive and have drives for datastore only. This has given me some nice flexibility previously.

Removing all but a single USB drive with ESXi installed on and setting the boot order in BIOS to this specific device should in my opinion work. It does not. Playing around with boot order, boot up delays (in case the USB drive takes a long time to initiate,) and other boot options such as Boot USB first, boot removable drives etc. does not help either. However, if I boot and press F10 to bring up the boot selection menu and selecting the correct device it works.

I will submit a question to Intel support. I’m actually somewhat interested in how they handle their support since I have not had the need to try it before.

* UPDATE *
I found a solution to the issue. ESXi uses GPT and “UEFI Boot” needs to be enabled to get it to work. This thread over at the Intel Community solved it for me: DQ77MK does not boot automatically from SSD drive.

New virtualization hardware in the house

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I launch this blog now that I got some new hardware.

The idea is to step up the game a notch or two from the previous system. Here is an article I wrote for NordicHardware about my previous system, the one that will be upgraded now: Vi bygger lågeffektsserver med virtualiseringsteknik

The article is in Swedish but the main point of the article was to demonstrate how to build a low power ESXi server for home usage. The specifications of the system is:

A really cheap system consuming between 45W och 70W depending on load.

The next build will be slightly more powerful and the following components have arrived so far:

PSU is still up in the air as I’m trying to find a solid 80+ gold unit for decent money. Case will most likely be a sound dampened Fractal Design Define Mini. I will dedicate another post to some of the motivation for this hardware and also how i intend to solve the storage part. Component and storage selection are restricted by several factors in this build, which I also intend to cover in that post.