Hey There,
I figure this is a long shot and I understand the possibility is near zero with getting this to work.
So I have a Dell PowerEdge 2950 - recently upgraded the motherboard to a gen 3 and popped in 2x xeon 5460's in there. It has RAID 1 and RAID 5 volumes. - Vmware resides on RAID 1 volume and data is on RAID 5. BIOS is 2.7 the latest version. The PERC RAID SAS card firmware (2.2.1 i think) and backplane firmware (1.0) is old but I'm trying to get Dell open manage to work in vmware if anyone has any insight on that .The openmanage is installed in vmware but the app im not sure how to use basically.
The dell poweredge 2950 has 2 sata ports so I connected an esata cable to sata port A - it's enabled in the BIOS.
Edit: The sata A port on the server is connected via an esata bracket. a 2tb drive plugs into the esata bracket.
I found a problem with this setup that can crash vmware hypervisor 5.0. I was able to duplicate it at will.
- 1) keep esata drive off
- 2) power on server
- 3) on dell servers at the end of it posting and initializing you'll get a hit F1 to continue or F2 for setup
- 4) power on esata drive
- 5) hit F1 to continue
- 6) wait for vmware to load - eventually vmware/server crashes and reboots with fatal error
I'm not exactly sure why vmware/server crashes but I'm pretty sure it has to do with the BIOS/sata controller and the fact I turned on the drive after initializing.
So I thought about popping in this Asus u3s6 - it's a PCIe 4x USB3.0/Sata 6 card to see if I get the same problem. I was surprised it even worked in the Dell PowerEdge - I popped it in the pcie 8x slot. It powers on. I plugge the esata bracket to the asus controller card. The ASUS BIOS sees the 2TB esata drive. Vmware boots up fine; however, it doesn't see the drive - I'm guessing vmware doesn't know there's a sata controller there.
So after that my question is this - is there a way to install the Asus u3s6 drivers into vmware so it can see the controller card so I can rescan the datastore on the 2tb esata drive?
Also if you have any insight on the Dell Openmanage 7.0 on vmware that would be great. I already have it installed - im not sure if it's configured right I just followed the instructions from forums and from dell. I did setup SNMP after install but not sure if its configured right. I have been doing research and I got this far but I can't get the openmanage software to connect - I get a blank page. I'm not sure if im doing this right either.
Edit2: I got Openmange 7.0 to work - All I did was install Java 1.6 U31 and it worked after. Maybe it doesn't like Java 1.7.x
Any insight, advice, or help is greatly appreciated!
Thanks!