I am in trouble!
So we bought this server a year and a half ago. Its a Dell T320. It came with a Perc h310 Raid card. I'll be honest I messed up the install. I didn't know about the SD cards and VMWare coming on them or anything. When the system arrived I setup a Raid 5 with a hot spare. I then proceeded to install Vmware onto the Raid. I changed the boot order and booted to it and that was that.
A year and a half later we have noticed all along horrible latency problems copying files between VM's and out to network and so on. I did some googling to find out Raid h310 is rubbish and I should upgrade to a h710 which is compatible and will not lose data in doing so.
So we ordered it. I powered the server down. I unplugged the old card. I plugged in the new h710. I powered it back on and went into raid config (Ctrl R). There was the raid, optimal state everything looks fine. I enable adaptive read ahead and write back caching and reboot the server. It proceeds to boot to vmware 4.1. I had installed 5! After an hour of scratching my head and having no VM's or anything I get to thinking this was the first server I setup and I think I set it up wrong. I change the boot order to the Raid, but it doesn't matter, it still boots to the dang SD cards which is nothing but a blank install with no datastore.
So my problem…
1. When 4.1 boots of the SD cards, there is no datastore. I can see the RAID card in configuration but when attempting to add a datstore it wants to create a new one. I cannot afford to lose this data.
2. How come when I boot to the raid the VMware 5 is not booting?!? If the raid is intact which it sure appears to be, it should be there!
I am unsure how to proceed. Admittedly I don't have backups of "all" the VMs only 2 of them. I need to get it to boot to the VMware that I installed.
Can I install Vmware 5 or higher on the SD cards and import the datastore? I will probably try this as the SD card install is empty as it is…
Please advise
Best Answer
So upon checking the boot sequence again I had only change 1 of the two options. I had changed the C drive to be first in boot order but I also had to change lower down that the raid was first boot device. Upon doing that vmware 5 booted up and I was able to reattach the datastore and all was right with the world. However, since I did it wrong the first time I am fixing my mistakes. I used VMWare workstation to download the 4 VM's to my local PC, installed Dells VMWare 6.0 custom ISO to the SD cards, attached the datastore on them and am running all 4 machines through VMware converter to upgrade their hardware version and change them to thin provisioned instead of thick.