[SOLVED] Unable to assign drives

Decided to give unraid a try to see how it works before putting it into production. I have it running in a VM on an ESXI 4.1 server. It's PXE booting from a local PXE server because I am unable to boot directly from the USB stick. It's funny because I solved the PXE issue before I realized I needed it.

Anyway, boots up fine, recognizes devices okay, have a trial key. When I goto Main, I drop it down to 3 slots, and disable the cache slot. The drop down box lists SDA, SDB, SDC which corresponds to the 3 8GiB virtual disks I created. Whenever I select anything, it doesn't stick. The page reloads and it goes right back to unassigned. I have disabled adblock entirely and have even tried using Edge (which had no adblocker installed) no affect. I seem to be completely unable to test this out.

Been pouring over the forums for the past 8 hours or so to get this setup and running at all. Lots of good help to be found here. Some quick notes:

PXE running from RPI tftp-hpa server. Had a lot of trouble getting this setup correctly in PFsense & with the RPI. Seems to require a particular pxelinux.0 file that I could not compile on my own. Found a file set here: http://stuffbyjeroen.blogspot.com/2011/07/using-unraid-server-to-pxe-boot.html that gave me the correct files for this to work.

Unraid would PXE boot, but not work correctly until USB was installed to the server and passed through to the guest. Discovered that ESXI 4.1 doesn't have a non-trivial way to boot from USB, if it's even possible.

I cannot migrate to a high version of ESXI 4.1 (that supports USB booting) due to an improbable issue with the video ram accessible in the option rom of my server's motherboard. ESXi 5+ requires more than 8MiB, and no matter what kind of card is attached, the MB will not give access to more than 4MiB during POST, and this prevents ESXi 5/6 from installing or even booting if preinstalled.

The disks are attached through a virtual LSI SCSI SAS controller. The LSI Parallel controller isn't recognized and the disks don't even show up.

Preclear script & plugin shows "no unassigned disks available".

After trying for a long time, I read in the logs that super.dat file could not be found. I created the (blank) file, and verified all permissions in the entire config directory were 777.

It's very late, and I'm really tired and out of ideas. Please forgive any grammatical or spelling errors.

Anonymized diagnostics attached.

Thanks.

tower-diagnostics-20160822-2318.zip

The running of unRAID on a virtual machine is not supported, though some people have reported some success as you've no doubt discovered in your searching of the forum. It does need to boot from USB though for good reasons and, as far as I know, there's no way round that. Try it on bare metal, it's good and if you have problems someone will be able to help you. As it is, you've just got too much working against you.

Appreciate the reply, but I don't have 3 spare drives to test it with. I have a working system in place that I'd like to duplicate using unraid as the foundation. I need to make sure functionality won't be seriously impacted, and I'd like to run them side by side for a couple weeks to test it, and a VM is the perfect way to do this.

I did some more research and used Hiren's boot CD & Plop boot manager to boot unraid via USB. I was surprised to find that was actually considerably slower to boot this way. In any event, it did boot from the USB stick, and as I suspected the issue remains. Feels like a write permission issue, but I 777'ed the entire boot directory, still no luck.

Edit: Not the only one to see this issue before. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=30427.0

Bingo:

Credit goes to BetaQuasi from a few years ago. Works like a charm.

Well it turns out I didn't give myself enough credit!  I started wondering if this was a VMware issue rather than unRAID based on gfjardim's response - as mentioned, the UUID of the disk wasn't being presented to unRAID properly.  Then, I found the solution!

 

- Shut down your unRAID VM

- Edit the Properties of the VM

- Go to the Options tab, Advanced, highlight General and click on 'Configuration Parameters'

- Click 'Add Row' and type the following:

 

disk.EnableUUID

 

with a value of:

 

TRUE

 

Start up your VM and now all the scsi vmdk's have UUID's assigned and can be added to the array!  Time to repurpose the SSD I had RDM'ed for cache and move cache to a VMDK on my ZFS pool.  Winner!

 

EDIT:  In my excitement, I forgot to give credit where credit is due - I found the information in the following blog post.. while the poster wasn't experiencing exactly our issue, it made sense that enabling the option may fix it for us too.

 

http://dizwell.com/doku.php?id=blog:the_case_of_vmware_and_the_missing_scsi_id

Edit: Corrected contained link, as the originally linked page had moved.

Edit: Edit: :Facepalm:

There is a whole section dedicated to ESXI & Unraid, including answers to the above issue. Kicking myself for the time wasted because I didn't see that subforum. 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=40679.0