Installing ESXi 7.0 on a Dell T320 Server
For starters, I feel that I it is my duty to advise that the contents of this post are not supported by the manufacturers and it is definitely not a good idea to implement this in any Production environments.
With the release of vSphere/ESXi 7.0 a number of changes were introduced, including the deprecation of VMKLinux drivers. This means that any hardware components that do not have a native driver will not be recognised.
In the case of the Dell PowerEdge T320 server, the server itself was supported until ESXi 6.5 U3. I managed to install ESXi 6.7 on it without any Errors or warnings, but when I tried to install ESXi 7.0 it was not as straight forward.
The first thing I checked was whether my processor was still compatible. Even though the T320 server is no longer supported, I checked and its processor (Intel Xeon E5-2400-v2 in my case) is still supported.
The actual issue that I experienced was that my hard drives were not recognised by the ESXi 7.0 installer. In order to understand which components were not working, I plugged an empty USB Memory Stick to my server and tried to install ESXi on it. At this point I was presented with the following error message:
From this error message I could confirm that:
- Even though my CPU was indeed still supported, that will probably not be the case in the near future;
- The unsupported device in this case was my PERC H310 RAID adapter (PciInfo [1000:0073 1028:1f4e]).
After some research I found that my RAID adapter could be upgraded to the PERC H710, which it supported by ESXi 7.0.
This is what the adapters look like next to each other:
After replacing the RAID adapter, my hard drives were recognised by the ESXi installer and I could successfully complete the installation.
A couple of things to note:
The PERC H710 adapter does not support non-RAID, which is what I had in place with the PERC H310 adapter. In my case, I had to configure a RAID array which involves re-formatting my hard drives. So it’s a good idea to backup your VMs before proceeding with this upgrade.
The onboard RAID controller on the T320 server (PERC S110) is recognised by the ESXi 7.0 installer. I didn’t explore this option as this solution would be slower than the H310, and also the S110 does not support SAS drives.
References:
https://docs.vmware.com/en/VMware-vSphere/7.0/rn/vsphere-esxi-vcenter-server-70-release-notes.html
https://www.vmware.com/resources/compatibility/search.php
https://downloads.dell.com/manuals/common/rc_h310_h710_h710p_h810_ug_en-us.pdf
https://downloads.dell.com/manuals/all-products/esuprt_ser_stor_net/esuprtl_adapters/poweredge-rc-s110_user%27s%20guide_en-us.pdf
https://dl.dell.com/topicspdf/poweredge-t320_owners-manual_en-us.pdf