For those who are running VSAN in their environment, I would urge you to have a look at this KB article: Storage Controllers previously supported for VSAN that are no longer supported (2081431). This KB article describes a list of disk controllers which have been removed from the VSAN HCL because of the shallow queue depth. I described in an article a while back “Why Queue Depth matters” and this is also reiterated by Rakesh from VSAN product management in this blog article on the vSphere blog.
If you have purchased Virtual SAN for use with these controllers, please contact VMware customer care for next steps.
Any idea why the LSI 2008 based controllers got yanked, mine has a QD of 600 and most support the same QD granted you have proper firmware on the HBA. Heck even with my version 7 LSI FW (6 years old) I had 600 QD in esxtop but was in IR mode, a quick EFI flash later I was at version 19 FW and into IT mode.
The blog post http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2014/07/update-virtual-hardware-compatibility-guide.html clearly states controllers with a QD lower that 256 were removed…it does not seem that way. If vendors want to cripple their HW with old/broke firmware then punish them (cough cough Dell w/ the H200/H310’s) but please don’t punish the broader community and potentially drive up vSAN hardware costs when these HBA’s are absolutely capable of driving excellent vSAN performance. Shaking my head.
Controllers which have been removed were discussed with the 3rd party vendor. I don’t know the exact criteria so cannot comment on this.
However, if you have purchased VSAN and are running this do contact VMware Support about this issue, and they will work with you on resolving this.
If you are running this in a home-lab, than don’t worry… it won’t break.
Hello,
for what i understand we have to let the “vsan” part manage the whole disk (like zfs). So for me we can eject all raid controller and the SAS HBA seems the best. My own experience would recommand the LSI 9207-8i or LSI 9211-8i.
I know that ibm use those controller but with their own firmware, and for example for zfs most of the time we flash those ibm controller with the LSI it firmware, like this it becomes a classic LSI 92xx.
Can you confirm that? Or maybe you have another point of view concerning the raid controller/hba
thanks