Hello,
This is my first venture into RAID. I'm running an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ on a ECS A780GM-A mobo with 8GB Ram. This is just a home VM server for educational purposes. I recently purchased a PERC6/i from eBay. It is plugged into the 16x PCI-e slot. I have 4 Hitachi 500GB SATA's and purchased Tripp Lite S502-20N SAS to SATA cable.
I've installed the card, attached the drives and booted the system. I configure RAID 10 (I have also tried RAID 5, if that matters) and all goes well. I have even waited for the initalization to complete (took like 6 hours) just to be sure it was a non issue. So far so good. All as expected.
I then install ESXi 5.1 onto the RAID and that goes smooth as well. I install vSphere Client to a workstation, downloading it from the ESXi server. Again, all is well.
Then, I attempt to create an Windows XP 32bit VM. I have copied the WinXP32 ISO to datastore1 in an ISO folder. I generate the customize VM config. I keep defaults for all but RAM (2GB) and HD (40GB). Select this ISO and choose connect at startup. I start the VM and it begins. (Note that I have used this very same ISO to build several other VM's on my single drive VM server without a single hiccup). I get the normal prompts, format the drive and then it begins ripping thru the files it has to copy to begin the setup.
NOW THE PROBLEM: During the copying of the setup files, it will fail, stating it can't find some file. This happens randomly. I may copy 30 files and fail or it may copy 50 or 60 and fail. I have NEVER been able to get past the copy phase. Upon rebooting the VM, I get the NTLDR is missing message. So it seems to be loosing connection to the ISO. I have tried several other ISO's of other OS's as well, all with the same results. The only new thing here is the PERC6/i.
1. Do I need a firmware update? See images for info...
2. Are there patches or anything I need to add to ESXi to work better with the PERC6?
Thanks for your time and help!
Doug