upgrade path

ESX 3.5, IDE, and Me

What the heck am I talking about you say? Well I decided to load ESX 3.5 on a workstation of mine. This is so I could do a test upgrade from 3.5 to 3.5 Patch 3, mainly because I want to make sure VMFS and the VMs are retained after upgrading to said patch level.

So I commenced installing ESX 3.5 on my 40GB IDE drive, yeah I said IDE, who uses those anymore anyways, apparently I do. The install went fine, for the most part, until it said that I wouldn’t be able to use the current drive as a datastore (without advanced configuration). Anyways on I go, I finish the install and all is fine. I was able to connect using Virtual Infrastructure Client, but then I see the message that ViC could not find any static storage, click here to configure a datastore. I clicked on the link and of course nothing was there… did some searching and it turns out that ESX 3.5 does not support IDE drives as a datastore due to the fact that NCQ(native command queuing) is missing from IDE Drive, however SATA drives will work fine. So what I ended up doing is I just installed a 80GB Sata drive, yes small i know, but its only for testing purposes, and rebooted the ESX machine, from ViC. Upon rebooting it found the new hardware and I was able to use ViC to add the new datastore… all 80GBs of it, all right!

Moral of the story… SATA/SCSI okay, IDE not okay

Till next time,

NS