Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

ahci

VSAN with AHCI controller with vSphere 5.5 U2

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I’ve been following a thread on the community forums closely around the AHCI disk controller. This disk controller is an on-board disk controller which caused some problems when used in conjunction with VSAN because of a driver problem. Note that this disk controller is not on the HCL and is not recommend for use in a production environment or ANY environment where reasonable performance is expected and endurance / availability is key. Many homelabbers used this controller however and I am happy to say that it was reported by Philzy that this fix mentioned in KB 2079729 appears to have solved the issues experienced.

For all those wanting to use VSAN in their homelabs… Game on!

VSAN and the AHCI controller (hint: not supported!)

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I have seen multiple people reporting this already so I figured I would write a quick blog post. Several folks are going from Beta to GA release for VSAN and so far people have been very successful, except for those using disk controllers which are not on the HCL like the on-board AHCI controller. For whatever reason it appeared on the HCL for a short time during the beta, but it is not supported (and not listed) today. I have had similar issues in my lab, and as far as I am aware there is no workaround at the moment. The errors you will see appear in the various logfiles have the keywords: “APD”, “PDL”, “Path lost” or “NMP device <xyz> is blocked”.

Before you install / configure Virtual SAN I highly want to recommend validating the HCL: http://vmwa.re/vsanhcl (I figured I will need this URL a couple of times in the future so I created this nice short url)

Update: with 5.5 U2 it is reported AHCI works, however still not supported!