Installing vSphere 5.5 on Dell PowerEdge VRTX

Installing vSphere 5.5 on Dell PowerEdge VRTX

As of this writing Dell still has not certified their VRTX platform for ESXi 5.5. This means there is not a customized ISO available that contains the necessary drivers. The standard ISO from VMware will install just fine, but the SPERC8 controller will not be detected. No SPERC8 controller means no shared storage. The good news is that getting ESXi 5.5 installed on VRTX is as simple as manually installing the correct storage driver. I have encountered zero issues running 5.5U1 on VRTX, however, it should be noted that this is an unsupported configuration so I wouldn’t recommend it for production environments.

Let’s start by downloading the correct driver. After you get 5.5U1 installed you’ll need to download the correct SPERC8 driver. The driver we need is megaraid_sas version 06.802.71.00.

Now we need to get the file in the correct folder, and run the command to install it.

1.    Extract the file to a local folder.

2.    In the vSphere client, use the Datastore Browser to upload the vib file to the host’s local datastore.

3.    Enter the host into maintenance mode.

4.    Log in as root to the ESXi console through SSH.

5.    Copy the vib to /var/log/vmware folder by running the following command.

cp scsi-megaraid-sas-06.802.71.00-1vmw.500.0.0.472560.x86_64.vib /var/log/vmware

Now that the driver is in the correct location we simply run the command to install it             as follows.

esxcli software vib install –v scsi-megaraid-sas-06.802.71.00-1vmw.500.0.0.472560.x86_64.vib

Reboot the host and now the SPERC8 controller should be visible. From this point             the standard ESXi storage configuration steps from Dell will work.

Regards,

Kabeer