Tuesday, June 16, 2009

ESX Update 4 and ICH7 motherboards

ESX 3.5 Update 3 and 4 no longer allow VMFS on ICH7 controllers - but improves access to CD/DVD ROM drives attached directly to the host and allows guest operating systems to access them. That's probably the right trade off for most people, but my ESX whitebox could no longer find its VMFS storage after the update to ESX Update 3. I found http://communities.vmware.com/message/1222880 VMware communities discussion and resolved the issue. In short the steps were:

1) download the update ESX350-200803213-UG from http://support.vmware.com/selfsupport/download/
2) extract VMware-esx-drivers-scsi-ata_piix-350.1.05-82663.i386.rpm from that tar file
3) rpm2cpio VMware-esx-drivers-scsi-ata_piix-350.1.05-82663.i386.rpm > VMware-esx-drivers-scsi-ata_piix-350.1.05-82663.i386.cpio
4) mkdir ata_piix; cd ata_piix
4) cat ../VMware-esx-drivers-scsi-ata_piix-350.1.05-82663.i386.cpio | cpio -id
5) cp * / [This step will copy the ata_piix drivers to their correct locations on the filesystem]

The initial boot of the host is done from the initrd, which is a packaging of essential drivers and other components that are loaded right after the kernel. The initrd mounts the root filesystem after it's done loading. As a result, the initrd needs these the older version of the ata_piix drivers as well).



Repackage the initrd in /boot/initrd-2.4.21-57.ELvmnix.img and run esxcfg-pciid:


1) cp /boot/initrd-2.4.21-57.ELvmnix.img /root/initrd-2.4.21-57.ELvmnix.img.gz
2) gzip -d initrd-2.4.21-57.ELvmnix.img.gz
3) mkdir initrd
4) mount -o loop ./initrd-2.4.21-57.ELvmnix.img initrd
5) cp /usr/lib/vmware/vmkmod/ata_piix.o to /root/initrd/lib/vmware/ata_piix.o
6) umount initrd
7) gzip initrd-2.4.21-57.ELvmnix.img
8) mv /boot/initrd-2.4.21-57.ELvmnix.img /boot/initrd-2.4.21-57.ELvmnix.img.orig
9) mv /root/initrd-2.4.21-57.ELvmnix.img.gz /boot/initrd-2.4.21-57.ELvmnix.img
10) esxcfg-pciid


Reboot esx and cross your fingers. I later found this to be slow/unstable on my ICH7 based motherboard and upgrading to the ASUS P5Q-EM ICH10R based board, which works out of the box with update 4 (once you add an Intel e1000 NIC)

Asus p5q-em and Intel e1000 NIC, both on Amazon.com
Posted by at 9:57 PM
Labels: , , , , ,

2 comments:

  1. Found your post and it was similar to yours. Using ESX 3.5 and wanted to apply update 4. The system is an IBM (Lenovo) 9690-7JU which has the ICH-7. After the upgrade lost the VMFS. Did your suggestion but did not work, at the end read the issue of being slow and unstable so went back to 350.

    Thanks for the post.

    Paul
    ReplyDelete
  2. hello,

    how do you add the e1000 driver?
    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)