After completing my last episode HomeLab Stage LXXIV: More Dell Servers, it was time to reinstall my Dell VRTX environment with VCF 5.2.x
The VRTX chassis is using a shared SAS backplane for the SLEDs, but I also configured vSAN OSA with super small diskgroup (1 x Cache, 1 x Capacity). The embedded SAS controller inside each M640P server is able to perform the required setup. The internal 10GbE switch with 4 x 10GbE SFP+ uplinks are enough for the dedicated environment. In the past I had 40GbE Mellanox ConnextX-3 NICs configured via VRTX PCIe passthrough, but those cards are also deprecated with ESXi 8.0. So only 10GbE for my VCF 5.2 environment.
The AVNs for Aria (required for VCF 5.x) are configured as VLAN based, not overlay (it is easier to deploy Aria products without the NSX Edge Clusters….
I configured my 4 ESXi hosts with 8.0.3 and setup vSAN + NFS. vSAN as principal storage and NFS as supplemental storage within VCF. The entire environment is based on a consolidated VCF infrastructure. Why not using the shared SAS Perc controller option, which is built into the VRTX????
The SAS shared backplane storage is no longer supported on ESXi 8. The shared PERC8 is on the deprecated list of vSphere 8.0, which is very sad 🙁
- VMware ESXi 8.x does not detect any SPERC storage devices.
- VMware ESXi 8.x has no driver HCL listing for VRTX SPERC controllers.
- VRTX blades may list support for ESXi 8.x, but the VRTX SPERC controller does not support this OS.
My VRTX chassis is equipped with two Nvidia P4000 GPUs, which does not support vGPU or any other kind of GPU sharing. The only option is PCIe Passthrough, so one entire GPU can be mapped to a single virtual machine.
Stay tuned for the next episodes of my HomeLab journey…..
What is going on next? HomeLab Stage LXXVI: Datacenter III Refresh