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Thor2923Flag for United States of America

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I am having trouble adding storage to my VMWARE ESXi 5 host

I have a HP Proliant DL380 G5 server that I want to use as my ESXi 5 host server, for my home test network. Before installing ESXi, I configured the HP server with 2 RAID 10 mirrors (one with 2 73 GB drives and one with 2 300 GB drives) and one RAID 5 array of 3 146 GB drives) All showed up successfully in the HP bios and using HP smartstart. I can see all arrays and I have run all tests to make sure they are working. I then installed ESXi 5 and everything went smooth. I then took my laptop and pointed to the IP of the ESXi host and downloaded VSphere Client and prepared to begin building my network. I noticed under STORAGE that only the small RAID partition was showing up so I went to add more storage by selecting ADD STORAGE/Disk/LUN, I highlighted the Local VMware Disk that I knew was the 300 GB mirror and added it with VMFS-5 and it added sucessfully. I then repeated the procedure and selected my RAID 5 array and did the same thing, but this time I received the error "CALL "HostDataStoreSystem.QueryVmfsDatastoreCreateOptions "for object ha-datastoresystem" on ESXi "10.0.0.21" failed.  I am kind of stuck now. I have not been able to add the extra storage to my host. Has anyone ever seen this before or have any suggestions?
Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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Yes, I have seen this error, the RAID 5 array is not a used array from another OS, e.g. it does not currently have another partition present on it?
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I think this server had SUSE on it before and we swapped out a couple drives with another server when I took this machine home...not sure what was on those drives last,could even be a mix of OSs, but shouldnt that wll be wiped out by now??
the three 146GB disks are they virgin unused disks out of the box, silver bags, or used?
the 3 146 are used, probably had SUSE on them before
No unless you perform a COMPLETE SMARTSTART ERASE the disks wil keep the partition OS. If you try to add disks, arrays with existing partitions, ESXi can complain trying to add a VMFS partition.

BOOT server with Gparted Live CDROM or Parted Magic, and remove ALL partitions.
well I see the RAID 5 partition showing up under STORAGE adapters....maybe I should just boot off the HP SMARTSTARD CD and delete and rebuild the RAID config?
ok I will look into your GPARTED live
Sometimes during the add wizard, it will list existing partitions on array, but boot from Gpart, Parted Magic and check.
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Avatar of Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
Andrew Hancock (VMware vExpert PRO / EE Fellow/British Beekeeper)
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thanks, you came thru again!!! I downloaded the gparted iso you talked about, but could not find a DVD to burn it on. I thought a bit then just want back into the HP system bios and deleted and rebuilt the RAID 5 array that would not load. IT IS WORKING NOW. I now have 600 GB worth of space to build my home network, so I am sure I will be back with more questions..bye for now
No Problems. Happy VMware Year.

I do not know why VMware ESXi has no partition utilties to remove foreign partitions, we have this issue ALL the time, when re-using old non-VMware LUNs!